Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Anyone sick of summer, take solace in About Dry Grasses. Made by the masterly Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the story is set almost wholly in a bitter winter. The background fills with schoolkids tossing snowballs; closer to the camera, an adult trudges across the white. This is Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher in a village school in a remote corner of eastern Anatolia. If the weather seems unchanging, Samet still feels time passing, three years into a mandated posting here in the frigid Turkish back-country. He is counting every second.Speaking of ticking clocks, the film itself runs more than three hours. Cinephiles will rejoice at the arrival of an art-house event movie, and the return of Ceylan’s painterly eye and stark philosophy. His grip can be hypnotic.Still, the director’s habit of letting scenes and themes unspool can feel languid. (Yes, fine: slow it is.) If his 2011 existential crime story Once Upon A Time in Anatolia remains a landmark, that mystery was built on the noir staple of a murder case. Here, the hook is more abstract. Early on, the story simply follows Samet’s daily routine in and out of lessons as he fondly imagines a new life in Istanbul. Darker threads start to collect at the edges of the film; hints of suspicion and surveillance. Then drama proper takes flight through a young female student who has a crush on Samet. If we took Samet for a nice guy, nothing is that simple. And yet Ceylan doesn’t follow the story beats we might expect. Instead, the film has a rhythm somewhat like life, where momentous events seem to recede as suddenly as they arise. Further into the film, the focus settles on Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a leftwing fellow teacher who lost her leg in a suicide bombing.For a widescreen image-maker, Ceylan also loves words. His default mode is characters talking in rooms, piling up ideas and evasions, the camera missing nothing. But his delivery system is the actors, whose excellence comes to feel doubly meaningful. For all the icy symbolism of the Anatolia winter, Ceylan always returns his attention to people. The most indelible moment in the film might be the look on Dizdar’s face as Nuray asks a simple question: weary and wary, but still not knowing the layers of deception that will come with the answer.Yet this deeply caustic film can also be darkly funny. Sitting drinking with Samet, the village vet recalls saving a local man’s cow. The man then shot the vet’s dog. Why? “Because he’s human,” says the vet. No great director’s worldview was ever clearer.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from July 26
