1/3 Plains and a Fancy. (Patreon)

Generally speaking, I don't write anything about films that I bail on. For one thing, I haven't actually seen them, obviously; more to the point, there's usually very little to say beyond "failed to grab me within its first third" (which is virtually always enough time for me to know whether or not I'm interested). Got nothin' vis-à-vis Paris Memories and Under the Fig Trees, both of which played in the Fortnight at Cannes last year and both of which I'd likely have abandoned at TIFF '22 had I attended. Just had no desire to continue.

I'm gonna quickly explain my W/O on The Plains, though, just because it's a film that could easily be written off as boring, and that wasn't quite my experience. (Indeed, I probably would've forged ahead had I strongly disliked the first hour, for fear that I might have to sit through it again later—see my recent review of The Outwaters. Wouldn't particularly bother me to rewatch all of The Plains, by contrast, which somewhat paradoxically made me more willing to switch it off.)

For those unfamiliar, the basic concept is this: Three hours of a middle-aged lawyer's commute home. Apparently there are 11 trips shown, all of them shot from the same position in the vehicle's back seat. Sometimes Andrew, the driver, is alone, in which case we generally hear him make phone calls and listen to talk radio. Sometimes he gives a ride to a younger colleague, David, and they chat about mundane topics. That's all that happens in the first hour, and I'm pretty sure that's all that happens in the subsequent two hours. Basically Locke, if Locke had nothing exciting going on and we could only see his face in the car's rear-view mirror. 

I was pretty stoked for The Plains, despite and/or because of that seemingly banal synopsis. (Also it made my concatenated list of last year's 50 most critically-esteemed films.) And it did draw me in at first, appearing to perhaps be a structural work—unless the radio's on, you can see the car's clock tick forward in real time, and it initially seemed as if maybe every trip (they all begin when Andrew leaves work around 5pm) would either occupy the same amount of time or cover the same distance, in the latter hypothesis being longer or shorter depending upon traffic. That's not in fact the case, and at one point director David Easteal cuts straight from mid-trip to mid-trip, without "resetting" at the office parking lot as before. This frankly made me question whether Easteal knew what he was doing, and I did not yet know that he also plays David (in a performance that I'd mentally noted as oddly lacking), or that the film consists in part of re-created conversations that he and Andrew, playing himself, actually had on their actual commute. 

Geez, this is gonna wind up way longer than my actual reviews. Already is longer than a lot of 'em. (I'm not spending remotely as much time and care on it, though.) Anyway, the main reason I jumped ship was simply that, apart from the structural dead ends, there wasn't much in that first hour that excited me enough that I wanted to watch two more hours of same (even considering the likelihood that Andrew and David's conversations would deepen over time). But the go-to comparison for The Plains seems to be Jeanne Dielman, a film I love, and I wanted to go on record, even without having seen 2/3 of the former, as proclaiming that comparison wack. They're both three hours long and they both depict mundane behavior in real time—that's the extent of the similarity. Jeanne Dielman is incredibly, almost obsessively controlled, and that's what prevents it from ever seeming even a little dull to me. The Plains, on the other hand, unfolds almost entirely in an environment that Easteal can't control, and that's what our primary view consists of (the road, other cars). My well-known beef with very protracted shots factors in here, even though the camera's always locked in one position; there's a version of the "dead time" problem that all-in-one-shot films have when they unfold over multiple locations, with actors struggling to keep our attention while they travel. The Plains features many shots, but some last like 15 minutes, and when Andrew has to deal with e.g. a stalled truck, or needing to get into another lane when cars aren't letting him merge, the "scene" necessarily has to become about that for a bit, with no real utility other than mere verisimilitude. More than that, though, the fact that we can't really see either party, while formally bold (and while it worked for me in Skinamarink), tends to flatten everything rather than heighten it. So much of Seyrig's performance as Jeanne Dielman consists of body language, and it's hard to do much with the back of your head. Intriguing concept, but it didn't really work for me, at least during that first hour. 

That's Ed, if the above piques your curiosity, I'd encourage you to give it a chance. Now streaming on MUBI.