While we’ll have to wait a bit longer to get the U.S. releases for Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, for which Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes, both films will be arriving in France this summer. Ahead of the former’s release in August and the latter’s release in July, the first full trailers for both have arrived, albeit without English subtitles.
In his review of Anatomy of a Fall, David Katz said, “The ensuing days after a romantic breakup, even if it isn’t a cataclysmic one, are an uncanny time. Perhaps once the spell of verbal conflict and sparring’s ceased, suddenly your sole companion for the most intimate thoughts is yourself once again, but it’s an opportune moment for contemplation: how did it really go wrong? Or, can I be honest with myself and acknowledge my own partial responsibility for its demise? For Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Theis), the key onscreen and offscreen players in Anatomy of a Fall, are enduring this quagmire, although their inevitable breakup was enforced––the latter has just tragically died.”
In his review of About Dry Grasses, Leonardo Goi said, “The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell “to make oblivion possible,” observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both a distillation of Ceylan’s recurrent tropes and a purification of his style, a film made of conversations that remain explosive even at their most forbidding, shivering with a sense of fluid emotions constantly at play.”
See both trailers and posters below.
Anatomy of a Fall will be released by NEON and About Dry Grasses will be released by Janus Films and Sideshow.