Many strange thoughts ping-ponged around my mind while watching David Easteal’s three-hour drama The Plains, despite nothing remotely strange occurring during it. Based in the back of a car for almost the entirety of its very hefty running time, the film captures a series of work-to-home commutes for a middle-aged lawyer, Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), who has a familiar routine: calling his mother and wife; listening to talkback radio; sitting in silence; or chatting to a colleague (Easteal, also the film’s director and writer) who sometimes gives a lift home.
Sound interesting? Of course not. But this extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art. Such wall-back voyeurism provokes many interesting ideas: that drama can exist without the dramatic and that engaging narratives are everywhere around us, observable with the right eyes.
The Plains is told through conversations, both between Andrew and his colleague, and Andrew on his phone. Eastern resists staging these calls on speakerphone, which would have allowed both sides of the exchange to be heard; instead, we hear only Andrew, which makes for a restricted aural perspective that matches the film’s restricted visuals. Ordinary speech turns into small puzzles we try to solve.
The gimmick of setting an entire movie inside a car has been done before, such as Tom Hardy’s one-man thriller Locke, which regularly cuts around and outside the car while the actor stays inside. Easteal’s camera remains dead still for the vast majority of the experience, allowing us to see only the back of Rakowski’s head.
Nor is it like Jafar Panahi’s brilliant Tehran Taxi, in which the Iranian director concealed three cameras to make for some highly dramatic moments. But The Plains isn’t dramatic at all, operating in slow and small reveals, the details of the protagonist’s life gradually fleshed out.
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We learn that Andrew has been in the legal and courtroom game for a long time (part of “the old guard”). He has a wife named Cheri (Cheri LeCornu), who is occasionally seen but never heard. The health of his friar elderly mother of him, who he calls most days, is deteriorating. This tangent constitutes the equivalent of a plotline – although, a word like “plot” doesn’t sit quite right, implying an artifice antithetical to the film’s naturalistic vibes.
Keeping the camera fixed in a moving vehicle evokes a contradictory feeling of being stationary while constantly on the move (not withstanding quite a lot of traffic). This is far from new, with many precedents in cinema, including one of the medium’s earliest genres: a type of film known as “phantom rides,” which were often shot on moving trains.
When Easteal breaks this format by cutting to occasional drone footage – filmed by Andrew – this shift feels epic. Context is everything. This is why, in the wordless animal movie Gunda – another staggering quotidian work – the simple arrival of rainfall can feel far more dramatic than any city block-levelling spectacle in a Marvel movie.
In his hugely influential book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood observed that commercial entertainment “exploits the alienation and boredom of the public, by perpetuating a system of conditioned response to formulas.” The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most obvious contemporary example of this: a profit-motivated form of cultural decay, viewing audiences as objects to manipulate.
Great outside-the-square films like The Plains, rare though they may be, exist on a different frequency, reminding us there is no “right” or “true” motion picture experience – only different scales of convention and experimentation.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism