Casual Relations

Rappaport's film is a series of vignettes that show our "casual relations" in various senses of the word. Most insightfully and most directly, the most memorable scene in the film, in which a male and female ex awkwardly talk as they drive to a hotel to "reacquaint," with the Stones' "Under My Thumb" playing all the while, shows how casually we consider our relations to others and how casually we consider the relationship between pop culture and everyday life. There are some other great scenes: a man tries to pick up another man at a disaster film documentary screening; a woman poses for a nude photographer as the photographer castigates his wife and child; a woman makes a stag film, and we are uncomfortably shown a great deal of the film; a woman shoots a man, and the scene is replayed several times, with different narration (from the woman or the man) each time; a man begs God to help him through a bad drug trip; a woman watches countless old films on her T.V. There's an awful film-within-a-film about vampires too. The film is very different from the documentaries that Rappaport is known for. It's worth tracking down.