‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Delivers a Pastoral Masterpiece About Turkey’s Contemporary Complexities

thewrap.com:

To this Turkish critic, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is our Mike Leigh and Anton Chekhov in one, with multilayered characters of social and political complexities engaging through dialogue lines that feel both off-the-cuff and studiously planned in their lavish rhythms.

Ceylan is also a master of luxuriously slow cinema with a recognizable visual style, haunting, minimalistic and sneakily riveting across textured, widescreen pastoral scenes and dimly-lit interiors that evolve with peerless patience.Written by Ceylan, Akin Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, his latest stunner “About Dry Grasses”—Ceylan’s best feature since “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”—flutters with all these pictorial qualities and emotional dispositions.

It’s a searing, mesmerizing and unforgettably wintry mood piece and character study that is in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, nearly a decade after his “Winter Sleep” won the Palme d’Or.It’s also a deeply Turkish film that gently shudders with something specific at a time when Turkey is once again at a political and social crossroads, with an ongoing election that finally threatens the standing of the current conservative government’s two-decade rule, as well as the aftermath of a major earthquake that recently devastated a big portion of the country’s southeast.

That something is an undercurrent of undeniable exhaustion at a national level, a state of Turkish being long in the making, well before the aforesaid election and natural disaster. “The weariness of hope,” one character casually calls it near the end of the film’s runtime of nearly three-and-a-half hours during an escalating quarrel between two intellectuals, a Ceylan mainstay.