,” his long, languid but slowly captivating ninth feature, is merely his latest work to examine man’s right, for better or worse, to be selfish, to be an anti-hero, to crave attention and isolation all at once, and to talk about it all night long.
But where those three-hour-plus films were occasionally essayistic, the similarly super-sized “About Dry Grasses” — a title that sounds almost self-parodically esoteric, a veritable taunt to Ceylan’s detractors — feels novelistic in a most nourishing way. Its longueurs unfurl the prickly desires and discontent of its characters, their circuitous intellectual arguments born of, and further driving, their tensely fraught relationships.
At the village elementary school, the outwardly droll, mild-mannered Samet is popular with his students in a way his dourer colleague and roommate Kenan , a local son, can’t quite manage. In particular, sweet-natured teacher’s pet Sevim nurses an innocent crush on Samet that he humors more than he should, repeatedly favoring her in class and offering her modest gifts in recess.