Who is the lady in The Lady in the Van and how'd she get there? Nicholas Hytner's newest film puzzles out this enigma till the end, but one thing's settled early on: she's most unladylike. The title also tells us so. Ladies come in manors, not vans. From here the dualities only compound in what fans of testy British humor laced with poignant pangs will surely find a enchantment.

It all begins with a motor revving in the pitch black and then boom! -- a shriek and a thud. When the screen goes from darkness to light, we see a van barrelling across the English countryside and the woman of a certain age at the wheel. As we later find out, she glimpses the body of the young motorbiker (Sam McArdle) who shattered and bloodied her windshield, and panics. He won't physically appear until the coda, though as a source of trauma and guilt, he hovers over her soul throughout. So too the cop (Jim Broadbent) who gave her chase will come back to haunt her.

That's because she flees the scene of the accident, believing her wayward vehicle was responsible for the biker's death. For the rest of her days, this deeply religious former nun dwells in boxy roadsters like the one that carried out the assault, leaving us to wonder about the destructive engines we metaphorically cling to in our own lives.

Miss Mary (née Margaret) Shepherd is played in all her dotty magnificence by Dame Maggie Smith. It's a decade later when the smelly old bag lady and her van turn up in Camden Town, a fashionable patch of north London filled with liberal culturati. Hytner has a grand time sending up the hypocrisies of this right-thinking crowd, for whom the only thing more appalling than Miss Shepherd's homelessness is her parking by their homes. There's the well-heeled couple (Deborah Findlay and Roger Allam) who'd even miss a night at the opera to thwart the dreaded van, and the young family a few doors down whose music repels the intruder to their ashamed relief. The Camden chapter begins in the 70s, yet seeing it in 2015, it's hard not to wonder what Camden's denizens would say were a Syrian refugee to enter their midst.

Out of English politeness, perhaps nothing. That may be one reason why local resident Alan Bennett gets himself into a curious ordeal. Does left-leaning guilt play a part? Kindness? Or is it to deter the assaults on her being that distract him while trying to write? “She’d be a good subject for you, one of your little plays,” a neighbor, Mrs. Vaughan Williams (Frances de la Tour), advises. The playwright plainly concurs. He grants Miss Shepherd refuge on his private grounds. The intended interval of three months turns into 15 years.

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 http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1168/director_nicholas_hytner_rolls_with_the_lady_in