UNLEARNED LESSONS

"About Dry Grasses."

- JUSTIN CHANG

What a thankless time it is to be molding young minds, at least in the movies. The grouchy literature professor in "American Fiction," played by Jeffrey Wright, makes the mistake of teaching Flannery O'Connor, and is rewarded with a leave of absence. A nastier fate awaits Nicolas Cage's evolutionary-biology professor in "Dream Scenario," who becomes, for an inexplicably large swath of the population, a nebbishy figure of nightmares-a sad-sack Freddy Krueger. Both movies are to some extent poking fun at the thin skins and trigger warnings of contemporary campus culture, but Paul Giamatti's nineteen-seventies ancient-history teacher, in "The Holdovers," fares little better, stuck during the Christmas holidays at a boarding school as frigid and isolated as the Overlook Hotel.

The weather is just as chilly and the classrooms just as cheerless in "About Dry Grasses," the latest epic of wintry discontent by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We are in eastern Anatolia, where craggy mountain roads and stretches of steppe lie blanketed by heavy snow; not until the season changes, near the end of a formidable three hours and seventeen minutes, do the desiccated yellow blades of the title push their way into the frame. Until then, we must make do with the prickly company of Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher who's finishing up his fourth and-he hopes final year at this remote outpost, a stint mandated by Turkey's public-education system. Our first glimpse of Samet, a tiny speck trudging across a blinding-white landscape, is a typical Ceylan overture: a lone figure dwarfed, spectacularly, by a terrain that reflects his inner desolation. Funny thing is, the closer we get to Samet, the smaller he seems; his outward affability soon melts away, exposing a heart of pettiest permafrost. That, too, is typical of Ceylan: he never mistakes a protagonist for a hero.