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Time moves slowly in Nuri Bilge CeylansAbout Dry Grasses.
Characters trudge sluggishly across snow-covered landscapes.
Conversations drift in all sorts of directions before finally gaining focus, and then drift back out again.
Even the windshield wipers on the cars seem to move with their own stately cadence.
Ceylans early career was marked by films that embodied the submerged, distant qualities of his protagonists.
These were elliptical and quiet pictures, located somewhere between the deadpan and the pastoral.
When people spoke in these films, their words were clipped or oblique.
They talked around uncomfortable things, or avoided them almost entirely.
Often, their voices seemed to recede into the background.
Sometime aroundWinter Sleep, however, Ceylans characters began talking more.
Ceylan knows how to hold our attention.
He cites an old proverb: If you travel in a herd, all youll see are asses.
Their left-liberal debate is heated and they talk swiftly.
Today, they just as often demonstrate the disconnect between these worlds.
Maybe its not such a contradiction.
Again, the director seems to tap into his own anxieties.
This is a rough, forbidding landscape, full of the potential for violence.
He goes along to get along.
Ceylans causticity is deep, but its not showy, and its not particularly cruel.
Like the Russian writers he so admires, he is a paradox: a scathing humanist.
But its a letter we know he will never write; it resolves nothing.
We walk away from the film with a dark empathy for these people, and for ourselves.
