About Dry Grasses

Six of us went to see the latest film by the preeminent Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The movie is called About Dry Grasses. The grass doesn’t show itself till about the three-hour mark in this three-hour seventeen-minute narrative. Until then snow covers the screen and also swallows some of the subtitles. But I am not complaining.

All six of us were enthralled by the stark landscape against which the main character was shown to be sweet, artistic, mean-spirited and duplicitous, by turns. Just when you might feel for him, he would betray your trust and then you might get a glimpse of another dimension in his character.

He is a modern-day Ulysses, pragmatic, amoral yet achieving a certain humanity as he struggles for transcendence. He perseveres like my orchid which has died three times and is now fighting for another rebirth.

Like Ulysses, he is a man of many turnings. I came away thinking he is a self-deprecating version of the director / writer himself. At several points we see the still photography of the protagonist which is clearly the artwork of Ceylan. He is telling us not to demand purity. The multitudes within are struggling to survive. As Tarzan said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

My orchid has a tongue. It speaks fluent orchid. I see it wagging, reminding me about her three weekly ice cubes to quench the parched roots. The dry grass speaks to us of Nature’s cycles. Petals drop or get buried under permafrost but thaw and regenerate like the human spirit. At one point we too might seem desiccated with despair, then buds appear.

Over enchiladas, guacamole and strip steak we six agreed with ourselves, far from the Anatolian winter. Conversation flowed from the spring we contain wetting our meadow of dry grass.