At 17:00 every day, Andrew, a middle-aged man, drives home from work through Melbourne’s outer suburbs in peak-hour traffic. Occasionally, he offers a lift home to a younger colleague, David. Over a year, their tentative small talk gives way to a warm friendship and open conversation within the confines of the vehicle, incrementally revealing their lives. One may wonder what a three-hour film, set almost entirely in a car and shot with a fixed camera from the back, can deliver? The answer is an unexpectedly engaging and entertaining observation of the rhythms of daily life, and a catalogue of suburban worries. In sensorial terms, The Plains charts the passage of time as the seasons change. The pitter-patter of rain and the familiar cocoon of the car provide a sense of comfort and safety from the outside elements. The car is the liminal space between work and home, as the day is pondered, the night planned. Documentary elements exist beyond the windscreen, as a fiction courses through ...