Watching snow melt

The day I DIDN'T see Barbie or Oppenheimer.

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

“Will you come to a movie?” I asked my friend —- or maybe I should say, my victim. I targeted her with precision, after all. I knew she didn’t work on Wednesdays. I also gambled on her good nature, knowing she’s the type who doesn’t overthink invitations, who reflexively says, “yes.” Which is just as well, because I wasn’t proposing we see Barbie or Oppenheimer.

No, I’d be subjecting her to a screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival — a film from a Turkish auteur. Three hours and 17 minutes long. It would tie her down for the day. 

For a sparkling, glorious, teaser-for-spring day, as it turned out. As it also turned out, I was running late, and I had the tickets, so by the time I met her at the theatre, the only seats left were the near the front, our necks craned for the long haul. 

For the epic trudge through the snow-covered paddocks of western Anatolia. 

The opening frame: a stark, empty field of snow under a pale, defeated sky. The Turkish auteur is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, his films are described as character driven, “Chekhovian.” This film is titled, About Dry Grasses. But dry grasses only reveal themselves after winter, and this winter, we sense, is going to be very, very long. 

We must endure this long winter hitched to the film’s main character, a high school art teacher. He is single —  he shares a house with a male colleague — unabashedly bored, hungry for adulation, desperate for a transfer to Istanbul, where he has lived before. He takes portrait shots of the village locals; they pose for him, obligingly. 

In the classroom he plays favourites with a teenage girl and her best friend. Outside class he puts his arm around her, slips her gifts. We bear uncomfortable witness to this overstepping of boundaries. Are we in Chekhov territory or in Nabokovian? Everywhere we see petty corruption and the abuse of power; gendarmes arbitrarily harass locals, teachers subject their charges to intrusive searches, no-one takes for responsibility for stray dogs. 

Long takes of naturalistic dialogue. Characters sip tea and wine in claustrophobic interiors, grey like the weather, save for a fire or a lamp or a shaft of weak light through a window. They talk. At length. About online scams, about the lost youth of the village, about whether, in an unjust world, collective action or individual resistance is the path of true virtue.

As the conversations unfurl and loop back on themselves, part of me wants to pause time in the world outside the cinema so I can stay here, held in these intimate conversations in the grey interiors of western Anatolia. 

A glow from my friend’s phone. She sends a quick text then puts the phone in her bag. 

At this point, I must give you a Spoiler Alert; in case you’re planning on seeing About Dry Grasses.

Our teacher, the main character, and his housemate get accused of sexual misconduct; the anonymous complainants later revealed as the teenage girl and her friend. Feeling victimised, our teacher singles out his former pet for classroom punishment. 

He turns increasingly nasty in his personal life too. His housemate — a “simple” man from a farming background — captures the attention of a female teacher from a nearby school. The woman has spent time in Ankara; she is urbane, politically radical and disabled, having lost a leg in a terror attack in the capital. 

In one scene we glimpse her alone in the bathroom, steeling herself before she meets the two teachers. We almost slide into her movie at this moment, before we’re pulled abruptly back into this one, where our anti-hero feels affronted by her interest in his housemate. How can she of all people prefer this simple man to him? She invites the two of them to dinner at her apartment; our conniving teacher does not pass on the invitation to his housemate and turns up alone. 

She twigs to what he’s done. But she’s tipsy; the inevitable is about to happen. She asks if he might first turn off the bedroom light. He agrees, walks away from her, and then ——

He walks out of the bedroom —

down the stairs — 

and onto the film set of this film we’ve been watching for — how many hours?

My friend and I turn to one another, eyebrows raised.

He walks past the film set into a bathroom. He pops pills, splashes water on his face. He then walks back through the film set, up the stairs, into the bedroom where the one-legged revolutionary is waiting exactly as he had left her.  

After this Brechtian rupture, I can no longer immerse myself in the travails of our anti-hero teacher. He’s an actor. This is a film by Ceylan the Turkish auteur.

I no longer see it as inevitable that our teacher will have sex with the one-legged revolutionary. He can walk away from this film, he can stop being a jerk. He doesn’t, however. He proceeds to have sex with her. But it soon becomes apparent that she is no victim. She has her own reasons for sleeping with him, her own desire for validation, and she remains captivated by his roommate. The teenage student has likewise stopped flattering our teacher; in a scene at the school, she refuses to apologise for lodging the misconduct complaint, refuses to divulge anything at all of her inner life. 

The last scene has our teacher as a remote figure, climbing a grassy hill, blathering, in voiceover — a sentimental affectation of national cinema — about the teenage girl, about how he hopes he awakened her imagination, the full Lolita now. 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The snow has finally melted revealing the dry grasses underneath, but our teacher is shrivelled too, all but dislodged from his own film. He is no prophet from Turkey’s wilderness. He’s a boring sleaze bag. We no longer believe in him, in Ceylan the auteur, in Turkey’s real life (electoral) autocrat, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Because the film’s about Erdogan’s Turkey, right?” I ask my friend when, finally liberated from the theatre, we march down Russell Street towards Stalactites — a Melbourne institution — for a ridiculously late lunch. The sparkling, glorious day is already fading; the late afternoon sun like nostalgia. 

For the next hour or more, over a plate of souvlaki, we engage in a dialectical analysis of About Dry Grasses, and what it suggests about the possibilities of intervening in history, and we talk about Erdogan’s Turkey and about other would-be electoral autocrats such as Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu and whether the resistance against their far-right governments will prevail or whether it will be out-manoeuvred just as the resistance in Turkey, and in Hungary, has been out-manoeuvred. 

And then we talk, as we so often do, about our teenage daughters, and how we seem to have lost all power to intervene in their lives, how we cannot get them to look up from their phones or immerse themselves in a book — never mind a three-hour plus film — we talk about our fears that they have been thrown off course, especially after Covid, especially in Melbourne, one of the world’s most locked down cities, lockdowns so long we thought we’d never see the inside of a cinema again. 

And when we’re out of time, because real life must resume, we amble, reluctantly, to the tram stop. And that night my friend texts me to say she enjoyed the film even though it was three hours and 17 minutes long, that it was intellectually stimulating, that the day made her feel like she was young again; “it reminded me of my university days.” 

And I no longer feel guilty for roping her into my cunning movie plan, because now I know that while sparkling, glorious days are indeed that, they mostly slip from memory, but we’ll never forget the day we saw About Dry Grasses and watched the snow melt.