In his otherwise astute Cahiers du Cinéma review of About Dry Grasses, Josué Morel describes the main character of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest epic work, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), as a frustrated, badly loved, and, at times, angry man, who’s “perhaps even a pedophile.” While it can be seductive, sometimes convenient, to reduce the ambivalence of a characterization to something so clear, the manner in which Morel pins Samet down constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of Ceylan’s commitment to capturing, among other things, the dimensions of child-adult and pupil-teacher relations in all their complexity.

About Dry Grasses involves a complaint about transgressive behavior by Samet toward one of his female students, 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), with whom he’s nurtured a caring bond within an institution where any expression of affection would be fundamentally at odds with its pedagogy and ethos. The plot of Ceylan’s film isn’t...