Repetition, of course, may be dull, but it is also one of the surest signs of conviction
COVID’s normalization of work from home—and the clear divide between the remote worker and the worker that could not be remote—has made many of us especially sensitized to the routines of work and transit. While commutes got faster in some cities during the pandemic, they are now getting longer and longer. They are also getting worse—city roads and public transit lines are bloated, clogged with a never-ending stream of repairs and accidents.
Another sign of our declining relationship with transit? A new vocabulary—all of it awful—has popped up in the last couple of decades regarding work, distance, and commuting. The worst phrase, by far, that came with this new advent of remote work is “digital nomad,” a poor attempt to cloak gentrification in a veil of itinerancy and counterculture. I also find “supercommuter” supremely irritating for its attempt to valorize inconvenience as work ethic. The “super” reeks of overcompensation. Op-eds can’t decide whether supercommuting is glamorous (wealthy tech employee flying twice a week) or tragic (person who has to drive three hours because they cannot afford city rent). This terminology obscures the fact that a commute is not simply an individual puzzle for someone to solve, but an index of collective problems: the cost-of-living, working conditions, housing, public transportation, climate change, and family obligations.
This tedium and routinization can pose a formal problem for artistic representation. Most Hollywood movies have a clearly established visual vocabulary for travel: drone and skyline shots, text on the screen, or a map with a dotted line and icon. This last one is a bit more cartoon-y, I admit, but quite cleanly communicates the abstraction and seamlessness of moving from A to B on-screen. Alternatively, travel is skipped over—left to the imagination, if acknowledged at all. Obviously, plenty of films show us transit (the train film, the road movie, etc. are still thriving genres), but how often does that filmic journey feel true to the tedium or anonymity of the real-life commute?
Two recent films outside of the Hollywood machine—Éric Gravel’s Full Time (2021) and David Easteal’s The Plains (2022)—have taken up the strange, hypermodern unit of time that is the commute, pushing us to think more deeply about the personal and social meaning of routine. Gravel’s Full Time is a high-octane portrait of a single mother traveling to work during a Paris train strike. This simple premise captures the panic and dread of interrupted commutes in our state of late capitalism. Watching the multiple delays, costs, and obstacles pile up provides a vicarious stress akin to Uncut Gems, After Hours, and other journeys where the protagonist, despite everything, must continue double-downing on their gambles (watching a bomb get diffused in an action movie is meditative in comparison). In sharp contrast, Easteal’s three-hour Australian docudrama, The Plains, adopts a slow cinema approach to the commute. As a repetitive and quiet story about a middle-aged lawyer’s regular drive from work to his home in Melbourne’s suburbs, The Plains captures what David Bissell in Transit Life terms this “strange, liminal part of our lives” between work and home, and how this routine “for better or worse, give[s] our lives meaning and shape[s] who we are.” For Easteal, commutes create a form of contemplation and communication that can only happen in this strange space and time.
Full Time and The Plains both examine a length of time that belongs neither to one’s employer (it is not compensated) nor to oneself. In opposite ways, both films capture the pervading modes of being in transit: the autopilot that kicks in when faced with routine tedium, the little ways we fill that time, and finally, the despair of running behind. Viewed together, they offer two extremes of what it means to see the commute as a cinematic event. In the case of Full Time, the commute is something which holds and orders one’s life; in the case of The Plains, it is an in-between that allows for contemplation and brief encounters.
The force of Full Time stems from the way Gravel portrays Julie’s (Laure Calamy) life through the tone of a thriller. We first see the schedule of Julie’s regular days and the choreography between her and her children’s nanny, the train station, her workplace as head maid of a luxury hotel, and home. When Julie begins interviewing for a more lucrative market research position, a train strike turns this carefully arranged schedule into a series of disorganized shuttle buses, hitchhikes, a stay in Paris overnight, and a rental car. If it sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. As Julie’s week continues, her expenses add up, her job at the hotel comes into peril, and her favors and goodwill with others run dry. Eventually, we see that she can no longer afford not to take these risks.
Full Time conspicuously never shows us any of the protestors or strikers, the structural blockage that drives our hero’s journey. In fact, Julie rarely says anything about the people striking. Her focus, rather, is personal and practical—finding alternatives and trying to maintain order. One of the film’s most intriguing moves, then, is how it implicitly positions Julie’s individual attempts to improve her family’s life alongside the collective action of the strikers. After all, the inconvenience Julie faces as the threat to her family’s livelihood might be a result of the railway strike, but more truthfully, it is the fault of the politicians and authorities who are not meeting the needs of the workers or their commuters.
In one scene, our worry about the state of Julie’s family is contrasted with a striker’s voice on the radio, as he states that he has not seen his family for days. As Julie attempts to move from the working class to the middle class, Gravel maintains that neither her efforts for individual uplift nor the French train union’s attempts at restitution through strike are easy undertakings. This comparison between Julie’s individuality and the solidarity required for a strike action is even, at times, deeply unfavorable for Julie. In one scene, Julie inadvertently gets a new maid fired when she asks her to cover for her. We never see or hear from the maid again. With this scene of failed solidarity, Gravel reminds us that it is not just Julie’s livelihood that hangs in a precarious position. Of course, this sacrifice only delays Julie’s inevitable firing. In the absence of any unity or collective organization, precarity exacerbates precarity; everyone is expendable and no one is exempt.
There is a classic saying about infrastructure: we don’t notice it until it doesn’t work. But what does this mean for the people who make it work? Julie and her fellow hotel workers, in fact, are not so different from the transit workers. The strike, as well as Julie’s increasing tardiness, makes visible the essential nature of their labor. As Julie explains in an early scene to her team of maids: “Our job is to be invisible.” As interchangeable, invisible hands these women vacuum floors, make beds, and scrub toilets. In a telling scene Julie is told off by the hotel manager for using a pressure washer (which harms the antique tiles) to clean a rich customer’s shit off the bathroom walls. The customer’s damage to the tiles is beside the point. Rather, it is Julie and her maids who must perform this demeaning task with their hands, maintaining the illusion that the place was never touched.
Not only does the film’s breakdown of the commute make visible the stark divide between different workforces, but it also indexes so much of what is wrong with infrastructure and work today. Car-centric cities, increasing housing costs pushing people further out from major cities, severely congested traffic, and failing transit systems are just a handful of the reasons that commuters are spending more and more time in transit in order to (get to) work. In Full Time, this liminal space is filled with frantic phone calls, mental arithmetic on costs and benefits, and emotional breakdowns. Gravel reminds us that the bargains we make just to “clock in,” as it were, are a complex series of negotiations between time, money, and willpower.
If Full Time addresses the fractures caused by the commuter, then The Plains paints a portrait of the connections made possible by the commute. The Plains similarly follows the transition from employee to person—the film’s slow car rides sometimes begin with small talk or frustrated rants about work, before moving on to other topics or tasks. Easteal’s docudrama follows the daily drive home of a middle-aged man named Andrew (Andrew Rakowski)—the film takes place almost entirely in these drives from the law firm in southeast Melbourne that he works at to his home in the suburbs. There is no rush, nor any big interview. Unlike Full Time, Easteal’s film fixates on the everyday: Andrew’s phone calls to his wife Cheri (Cheri LeCornu), calls to the home where his mother is staying, occasional carpool with another colleague (played by Easteal himself), the radio which hints at the state of politics in Australia, and long stretches of quiet. Easteal’s choice of shooting the film from the backseat, making it so that we only get the occasional, partial glance of the characters’ faces, is another inspired choice. There’s certainly no shortage of films with complex car rigs that offer multiple angles, but The Plains turns us into passengers listening in. We are, analogously speaking, in the position of the psychoanalyst.
There is something Groundhog Day-esque about the repetitive nature of The Plains—we see the structures and patterns of the drive, even recognizing the route after a certain point, and as a result, pay increased attention to the details and variations. Like Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, we grow accustomed to our protagonist’s routine. There is another layer of repetition to this film: Rakowski and Easteal were originally coworkers at a community legal center, and the film re-scripts the times Rakowski drove Easteal home.
Andrew, as the film progresses, becomes a deeply compelling protagonist. He is captivating precisely because we wonder whether he ever gets an opportunity to speak like this outside of these drives. Aren’t there things we can only say when insulated and trapped in the same space? As David Hering writes, “It’s precisely this apparent lack of intimacy that makes communication possible. Andrew feels able to share increasingly personal details of his life with David in part because he doesn’t have to look directly at him.” What happens when we cannot exit an awkward silence and are pushed instead to keep speaking? At the same time, you can’t help but wonder: what would these characters do if they didn’t have to go through this grueling freeway all the time?
Easteal’s film is not about a man conquering his surroundings, but a man living and compromising within them. The cinematic commute does not always have to showcase a break from our patterns, but instead may focus on relationships and circumstances built through everyday repetition. Repetition, of course, may be dull, but it is also one of the surest signs of conviction. In the film’s simple dialogue, Andrew contemplates past choices, knowing full well they have already been made, justifies them, or reflects on them before trailing off. We get the sense that this middle-aged man—unlike his younger coworker—has already made many of his life’s most dramatic decisions and has experienced most of his big events (the death of his sister, his marriage, his and Cheri’s “philosophical choice” to be child-free, his elderly mother’s stay at a home following the onset of dementia). The Plains’s slow cinema approach magnifies the passage of time, and when some of these characters exit the film, we—like Andrew—feel their absence deeply. Easteal’s film reminds us that the big events of our lives, whether positive or negative, are often felt most strongly in small, everyday moments.
Full Time and The Plains, despite their disparate tones, chart the truth of our current moment: as commutes take up more and more of our time, the people who accompany us on them (carpoolers, fellow passengers, train operators, etc.) become a greater part of our lives as well. These connections usually go unnoticed, but by making them the focus of their films, Gravel and Easteal remind us of the urgent issues that directly impact our collective ability to work and live today: personal fulfillment, conviction, and dignity, certainly, but also cost-of-living, family, and infrastructure. These films uplift the most “empty” part of our daily routines, suggesting that our commutes are not nearly as solitary as we believe them to be.
Charline Jao is a graduate student at Cornell University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century radical print culture, abolition, and representations of children. She firmly believes that the ideal cinematic environment is a matinee screening.