Film Journal 2024: About Dry Grasses
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
You could say a nearly 3 and half hour run time documenting a gradual spiral into an existential crisis using a script made up primarily of dialigue/conversation doesn’t sound like riveting cinema.
Rest assured it is. The fact that it never really resolves its inate grappling with things like hopelessness, despair, isolation and meaninglessness makes it even more engrossing.
It’s about a teacher who finds himself doing a practicum in a small village school in hopes of gaining a more prestigious position elsewhere. A controversy keeps him trapped in this village however, setting off the point of crisis. Along the way, or in process, the film keeps posing questions about, or perhaps at, existence. Such as, do our lives actually make a difference or are we just part of a grand social order? Does good mean anything when in reality existence is just about being good enough? Can we actually claim meaning in a world where even altruism seems predetermined?
Heavy questions. Whether it’s meant to drive us to self reflection is up to the viewer, but it most certainly is meant to shake us up in one direction or another. Perhaps to simply accept the truth of hopelessness and meaninglessness, or perhaps to push us to believe that hope and meaning exist, even if just as a possibility or as a constructed illusion. This is where the lack of resolve cuts through like a sharp knife, never allowing us to settle by constantly shifting our point of perspective within the ongoing dialogue. There might be meaning, it might all be meaningless, and inbetween we have this thing called a life pulling us between these incongruities and grasping at illusions of meaning just to keep on functioning.
Kinda like dry grasses seeking the rain and the sun.
The Stories of my Life 