beauty as a counterpoint to the moral baseness of a hero

CINÉ+ CLUB – WEDNESDAY JUNE 26 AT 10:25 P.M. – FILM

More than once, the Turk Nuri Bilge Ceylan happened to give in to the temptation of the beautiful image, to the weight of great meanings, to a somewhat affected gravity, in short to a certain auteurist arrogance. However, it would be unfair to reduce the filmmaker, who also knew, with May clouds (1999) , Far (2002), Winter Sleep (2014), describe heady existential lurches, exercise a photographer’s seasoned gaze, maintain a long conversation with beauty.

Dry Herbs, an imposing mass of fiction lasting more than three hours, pits a handful of bitter characters against each other in the rural solitudes of Anatolia, immediately raising fears of a new rethink. However, it is something completely different, more conflicting, more inseparable. A strange invitation from Nuri Bilge Ceylan to us: to spend more than three hours in the company of a scoundrel cooked in his own juice.

Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a teacher in a remote village awaiting a transfer to Istanbul which does not happen, is champing at the bit in this plain of narrow morals. The man allows himself inappropriate gestures towards some of his students. A complaint goes back to the rectorate, which incriminates him and his colleague and roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici).

Depths of the human soul

Both men are courting the same woman, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a schoolteacher, a woman of conviction, politicized, an activist to the point of having lost a leg during recent demonstrations. Put on the hot seat, Samet sinks into the mire of his stunted soul, ruling over his class like a childish tyrant, and, in the arena of love, displaying an unfathomable baseness.

The film thus aims to dabble in a background of acrimony and resentment, a priori quite unsavory, but faithful to certain depths of the human soul, as could be the case with Ingmar Bergman.

If Ceylan does not exempt its protagonist from any villainy, it does not exclude his pathetic, miserable side either. To the rout of this unappealing character, the film adds all kinds of gaps where beauty rushes in. Starting with these splendid photo sequences, each time Samet takes a portrait of an inhabitant, the region is then revealed through a series of still views, on its documentary side.

Beauty is the true destination of the film, which welcomes it without its natural emergence with the return of spring – a seasonal turn in extremis in which the title finds its explanation. Ceylan transcends winter monotony by inscribing the austere majesty of the setting into the strong lines of the frame. The bleak expanse then says something of the lost soul of Samet.