Before the lights go up

I try to make a habit of staying to the very end of a film’s credits, because you never know what you’re going to hear. I learnt that while sitting through Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. The film had seemed determined to live up to its title, but the reward was to discover Robbie Robertson’s magnificent “Breakin’ the Rules”, from his Storyville album, with its exquisitely understated Paul Buchanan second vocal and Wardell Quezergue’s barely-there horn arrangement.

Sitting through three and a half hours of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses last week was no ordeal. Ceylan is possibly my favourite living director, and his new one lives up to Climates, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and the rest. And while the credits were rolling, there was a bonus.

It was this. Philip Timofeyev’s “Adagio for Bassoon” is a piece of fake baroque music, written specially for the film. It’s an obvious homage to the popular “Adagio for Strings and Organ in G minor” supposedly written by Tomaso Albinoni in the 18th century but actually based on fragments of a manuscript left by the Venetian composer, turned into a piece in 1958 by his biographer, Remo Giazotto.

So a fake of a fake, then, in a way. But Timofeyev’s stately composition does its job perfectly. At the end of a dialogue-driven film in which the audience has been encouraged to reflect on all sorts of important issues, not least truth and lies, there is no rupture when the lights come on. We emerge into the street still thinking the thoughts that Ceylan implanted there.

* The still from About Dry Grasses shows the young Turkish actress Ece Bagci, whose performance is among the film’s highlights.