Thinking about the bus, and by extension public transportation, as the circulatory system of industrialized society. Public transportation is often seen as both the hallmarks of a developed urban space as well as a site of tension. It’s a place that brings together people that wouldn’t usually interact with each other, people across age, profession, class (to a certain extent). And it’s not just people of different neighborhoods, it’s people of different neighborhoods in movement. It can be routine, moving as part of daily commute to a job; it can be trivial, heading to the store to buy something. Or it can be pivotal, moving as part of a drastic life change. Regardless, all of these methods of moving create a sense of dynamism in this temporarily constructed shared space—one that’s like no other in an urban space, and one that’s only possible because it’s a culmination of so many other spaces.
Mr. Thank You offers a firsthand perspective with its most iconic scenes, a series of shot/reverse shots, coming from the POV of—not the driver, nor the passengers, but the bus itself. We see characters greet and wave at the passing bus, the vehicle a part of their daily ritual. We see the many characters that step aside to allow the bus to go through, mapping the ways in which the bus and road weave and bisect communities and people.
There are people leaving, and others returning. Some are drifters—always migrating, while one of the main protagonists of the film has never left home until this one-way trip, uprooted from her home to be sold into prostitution in Tokyo. There’s a sequence when some folks hop on the bus to attend a wedding, and then the next set of passengers hops on to attend a wake. (The wedding attendees get off, citing that it’s bad luck to share a trip with someone attending a wake. The passenger attending the wake gets off right after, feeling guilty after seeing the wedding attendees get off.)
The semi-public space of the bus allows for these opposites to converge. The background of the recession, and the path of the bus—going from rural to urban, intensify these contrasts. The bus acts as seams to the city. It stitches things together, the poor and the rich, the slimy and the innocent—temporarily connected by direction and destination. The seams both demonstrate how differences and multitudes can exist in the same space, and expose how divisions and gaps can be systematically created in the development of an urban space. In the meantime, the bus will keep running.