Romance is easy when you’re young. You have flexible joints, no mortgage, and absolutely no idea what glucosamine is.
“The Driving Seat” finds its comedy in the gap between who we were and who we’ve become — and the stubborn, sweet refusal to let that gap win. Writer-director Phil Lowe’s short follows a middle-aged British couple attempting to “reclaim their youth” by having sex in their Toyota Prius. In their own driveway. On a Saturday morning. It goes about as well as you’d expect.
What makes the film sing isn’t the premise — it’s the texture. The steering wheel that won’t cooperate. The paranoid glances toward the street in case the postman appears. The husband’s wounded pride when he learns his wife once did this before, with a man named Brian. Lowe understands that long-term marriage isn’t about grand passion — it’s about the petty jealousies, the physical indignities, and the love that survives them anyway.
Janie Dee is an absolute revelation as Alice. She delivers a monologue about the difference between male fantasy and female reality — “lardy thighs,” cramped spaces, the whole unglamorous truth — with such deadpan precision that you’ll wince and laugh in the same breath. It’s the kind of writing that could tip into cruelty, but Dee grounds it in warmth. She’s not complaining. She’s just telling it like it is, with the bone-dry honesty of someone who stopped performing for her husband decades ago.
James Lailey matches her beat for beat — his wounded fixation on “Brian” is pathetic in the best possible way, the kind of smallness we recognize in ourselves. Together, they create a portrait of marriage that’s unflinching and deeply affectionate at once.
Lowe’s direction keeps everything tight and observational. No wasted moments, no sentiment that isn’t earned. When the pink underwear ends up snagged on a garden bush just as the delivery man arrives, the punchline lands because we’ve spent seven minutes inside this couple’s awkwardness. We’re not laughing at them. We’re laughing with the recognition.
“The Driving Seat” is proof that the best comedies come from specificity — the Prius, the glucosamine, the Saturday morning routine interrupted by a doomed adventure. It’s a film about bodies that don’t cooperate, egos that bruise easily, and love that looks nothing like the movies told us it would.
They end up watching Saturday Kitchen. Of course they do. And somehow, that’s the happiest ending of all.
