The independent films of Mark Rappaport - Casual Relations, Mozart in Love, Local Color, The Scenic Route, and Impostors - are all offbeat variations on the drama of human emotions, turning the cinema in on itself with a dry humor and an always entertaining originality.
Rappaport describes Local Color, his first feature-length film: “Local Color is a film about eight people whose lives overlap...in strange and sometimes unexpected configurations.... They inhabit a universe of coincidence and chance, excessive emotionalism and dry irony. Flamboyant melodrama in dreary, desperate lives - operatic passions ground underfoot by the crushing flatness of daily existence. It is melodrama stripped bare, drained of the heavy breathing we associate with soap opera.... In a sense, the movie is the plot and the plot is the movie. Except that the plot is irrelevant. Suffice it to say, there is enough of it to choke a horse....”