Lindsay Anderson and Shelagh Delaney's The White Bus is a surrealistic film about a secretary who takes a strange trip, part of which takes place on the eponymous vehicle. The nameless girl has a seemingly dull life, which is interrupted by periodic flights of fantasy involving suicide, recreations of paintings, and pieces of meat that suddenly run blood-run. Between these fantasies are the details of her real life, especially as she begins a journey home to visit her family. She encounters a wide variety of people -- a teen-ager exceedingly angry that his rubgy team has lost a match, a young man who proposes marriage, a lord mayor who enjoys feeling her leg -- as she travels to locations ranging from a community center and a public library to a natural history museum and a civil defense demonstration. Along the way, the girl maintains a façade of passivity, even when events become quite surreal, as when all of her traveling companions turn into human dummies during the civil defense drill. At the end of the film, she enters a restaurant and eats dinner while the owners pile chairs on the tables around her, obscuring her from view and complaining about the never-ending pace of work.
by Craig Butler
synopsis
