Local Color

Streaming video - 1977

Although LOCAL COLOR is usually credited as being a minimalist film through its foregoing of complicated set design, director Mark Rappaport has intentionally conducted a feeling of excess in its textual elements. A shifting interior monologue among the cast of eight complicates our perspective of how this film is meant to be felt: without a form of protagonist, we are meant to reevaluate all of the characters’ actions when their intentions are laid bare.. The cast consists of a pair of twins, both named Andy, their respective lovers, an aging dentist and his wife, and two more women, each trying to break away from their fidelity with nightmares of murder and disappointment getting in the way. If this were not enough, there is simply too ...much plot, leaving an adequate summary to either be ineffective or impossible. There is a causal narrative, yes, but these events do not build in any form of act structure.. There is no feeling of climax or relief, simply a fleeting chain of conversations sometimes recalling past events in the film, yet sometimes interjected with a narrator adding an unscreened prologue or epilogue as if the current running time is not enough for Rappaport to throw information at us, completing his thought as postscript. more