“The Plains” Movie Review

 

“The Plains”

Movie Review

 

The Plains, a film by David Easteal and starring Andrew Rakowski, follows a guy in his late 50s who journeys home from work each evening in the outer suburbs of Melbourne.

The average person in the UK commutes to and from work for 59 minutes each day. That equates to five hours of your time lost on the road for a standard Monday–Friday paying work. The Plains is a movie that makes you acutely aware of time's passing and the mundaneness that can frequently go along with it. Time is the main component of the story.

 

The majority of the movie is filmed when Andrew, portrayed by Andrew Rakowski, and his colleague David, played by David Easteal, are driving home from a law office on Melbourne's highways. They occasionally have company. The car's digital clock, which can be seen clearly towards the center of the screen, marks out the rituals and procedures of each commute: the congested trunk road that connects to the highway, the repetitive light cycles, and the broken-down vehicles blocking lanes.

 

They have an odd, casual connection. Andrew is the older and chattier of the two, giving David all kinds of unsolicited advice, while David prefers to stand back and let Andrew speak. On every commute, Andrew calls both his wife and his mother. On occasion, climate change is discussed on the radio. On occasion, it includes irate locals lamenting the traffic. The only deviations from this singular point of view are a few amateur overhead drone photos that Andrew occasionally takes on weekends and vacations as a break from the commute home's strict linearity.

 

The narrative flow and point of view are purposefully repetitive. It's surprising how simple and entertaining it is to watch. The film is attentive and incisive, picking at the monotony that molds our lives and wastes time while giving our day structure. Because beyond this monotony and the constant awareness of time's passage lies the certainty of what time's passage ultimately means: death.

 

When compared to David, Andrew seems far more willing to share personal information. He constantly brings up his mother's failing mental health. He mentions his sister, who lived a life characterized by eating issues and died of heart illness. He discusses his mother-in-law, who passed away lately as well, and their connection. He has memories of helping his veterinarian father when he was younger and of the death and illness that are part of the job. He presents as cheerful and talkative, having lived a comfortable middle-class life that has allowed him to purchase a new car every two years. But below it all, there's a lilting sensation of loneliness or uneasiness.

 

An elderly man is sitting in his car, in this bubble of semi-privacy in Melbourne's traffic jams, observing the passage of time as the digital clock marks off each and every sixty seconds as they vanish forever. David Easteal discovers something incredibly meaningful in this endless repetition. He pushes us to sit and deal with that banality by essentially confining our point of view as viewers to a single shot, letting it permeate into us. Maybe it was a waste of time, but the movie is everything.

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