Bettine Mackenzie

  The Plains (2022)

Written and directed by David Eastal

We travel with a man in his fifties on his daily commute. He drives, we sit in the back of the car. He is a plain, anxious but contented middle-class white man with enough and not enough money, enough and not enough distractions, enough and not enough sadness. We patiently wait for him for a few moments each afternoon, like a child as their parents say final goodbyes to friends and non-friends at a party, before he finally arrives from the office at around 5:05pm. We get the sense he’s eagerly leaning on his desk and watching the clock just before that, since he just about always reaches us on time. We imagine him having everything prepared to go, his keys, his wallet, his jacket, to be out and in his beloved car (which is changed every two years to pre-empt wear and tear, two green ones so far, the most unusual colour) ready for the roughly one hour drive back into the city of Melbourne. Sometimes he’s a little late: 5:08 or 05:10. What happened in the office that day? We are only left to wonder as we stare at the car clock; he doesn’t mention it as he gets into the car; work is over and those glorious hours of the freedom of the evening have begun; not a minute can be wasted. We set off. The light is sometimes different, indicating a new season — the dark blue of autumn, the white light summer — over the course of the year, though the shop signs and buildings never change. The only variables, the only ones that really affect us and our journey, are the traffic jams and incidents that interrupt our flow, as they do in real life: unpredictable, inconsequential to those not directly involved, irredeemably frustrating, but not, in the end, important outside of that moment.

In ‘The Plains’, director David Easteal takes us on a beautifully monotonous three hours of everyday existential travel. Now and again a younger man joins us for the ride. He is David (the director in fact), about twenty years younger than our protagonist, working at the same law firm day in and day out, though markedly part of the “zoomer generation”, someone restless and eager for change. A soft tension sits between the two men, somewhere between the radio and the handbrake, a simple and harmless gap of time, never rising more than when the quiet and introverted David shuts down The Man’s gentle probing about his recent break-up. As he speaks of his past in New York as a bartender, his spell in London and an upcoming trip to Berlin for three weeks, we get the sense David is plotting his next escape, that this current existence is temporary and really not of huge significance — something The Man, who has dedicated his life to the law firm, can’t quite understand, or refuses to. A pity draws over the car when we learn The Man might lose his companion, someone he eagerly awaits to shake up his daily routine. 

As a passenger in life and this film, we watch and listen as the two men unfold important parts of their existences to each other. The film is really a docufiction, with David the dirctor perhaps sharing truths about himself, a bit like Richard Linklater appearing in a taxi in masterpiece Slacker. Despite being a ‘guest’ in this world of the car, David is unshifting in his reservedness, to a degree of almost impoliteness, leaving The Man to conduct long soliloquies, often about his relationships — primarily the ones with his mother and wife, the two most important living people to him. Though we never hear the voice of either woman their presence is immense in this very small, contained man’s world, the tin can toy car, which, at one point in the film, is changed for a new model without us even realising. Conversations on the phone through earphones with The Man’s mother let us know she is in a care home, a different person to the woman he once knew. He is now the caring adult, and he is alone: “mummy”, as he calls her still, is far away. It’s a situation many of us come to face at some point or another. The universal role reversal of parent and child, if we all manage to reach that stage.

Now and again and without any warning we leave the world of the car and find ourselves soaring above Australian plans. This feels like the place The Man dreams of being in, and indeed we land eventually in a place that all his efforts, all the days at work, the careful balancing of finances, have culminated in building: a bungalow set far from any roads. The flights we take turn out to be seen from the perspective of a drone, a gadget that The Man uses to see beyond his porch, on which he sits with his wife, the woman we have heard so much about through him. He drives over the landscape and surveys it, God-like, from the comfort of his static rocking chair. Perhaps he cannot help travelling, even when, at last, a mortal, home and settled.

It is a film I adored. Not for everyone, tedious in its painstaking lack of action, tender and tragic. The tale of a hermit, only one whose cave is his car and his wilderness of the city. Your mind is left to wander, as it does in a car ride, to your own situation, and to wander back to the one you are part of. Seeing the face of The Man at the end gives a strange sensation: he is not what we imagined. He has been a hero from our vantage point in the back seat; we have relied on his safe driving to prevent drama and have doggedly followed him in his quest to safely and efficiently return home each day. He is our everything, this protagonist, in his everyday strife and craving for affection. But when we see him directing his drone lying back in his shorts he seems altered, beside his long-suffering wife, the man we’ve always recognised from behind, the one in a suit. Here, on a sunny porch, off-duty, playing with his latest mechanical toy like the child he perhaps yearns to be still, he feels hopeless after all. It suddenly seems clear why he is stuck in a dead end job, why he is useless at visiting his ailing and suffering mother, and why his relationship is stale. He lives at a distance. Perhaps all he told us was a lie. Perhaps it was boring. Perhaps we’ve wasted our time. Perhaps we all, if given the chance to soliloquise for hours in traffic, would bend the truth a bit to tell our stories. It becomes an intensely moving and dramatic ending, a hopeless finale to a hopeless situation. The same feeling, for me, as the dream fading and realising your Great Love is in fact Nick Bottom the Donkey. Our Hero really is an Everyman, it turns out, just as we all are. It is all hopelessly beautiful.