It's uncanny how this little film anticipates Raul Ruiz's entire post-1977 oeuvre: moving walls, knife stabbings, tableaux vivants, Max Ernst, deadpan humor, nonstop interplay between the real and the imagined, the quotidian and the artifice, classicism and vulgarity, opera and soap opera...

"The elements of melodrama (and of theatre) that I like have more to do with painting: it’s the gesture, the mise en scène, the lighting, the arrangement, the pregnant moment right before something happens or right after it has."

"The emotional tenor is not parody. If I’m parodying anything, it’s the fact that we can only respond to emotional situations in prescribed ways. They’re the only ways we have to respond to the trite elements of our lives. I guess it’s more a matter of irony than of parody."

-Mark Rappaport

When we're looking at some tableaux, obviously fabricated and under the narration of some character, it's hard to say whether this is "the pregnant moment right before something happens or right after it has," because whether these characters will actually do anything with their feelings is questionable. They imagine melodrama attending the events of their lives, but when is it supposed to happen?

Not overly enthusiastic about the textual/thematic schema here, but Rappaport’s formal language feels like something I’ve been speaking my whole life, and finally watching his movies has given me the chance to finally exercise long-dormant conversational muscles.

The Scenic Route is opera as found-object, a dramaturgy of banality through transgression. Rappaport's work appears to me as somehow startlingly ahead of its time while simultaneously outside of time--hell, outside of the notion of meaning as well (though that isn't to say that the film is an exercise in substantive nihilism). It is distinctly postmodern in approach, but strangely affecting in its intentional and severe lack of affect, seemingly creating and then existing in its own paradox of sign-and-referent relationships. As such, Rappaport's vision is that of a puzzle-box that has neither interest nor need in being solved, which in and of itself is part of the film's allure. 

81/100

First Rappaport. Won’t be the last because I really liked this. Could be about so many things, I’ll probably understand it more once I get a tighter grip on the rest of his work. I especially like how he breaks down the language of film - revelling in its falseness and surreality - to match the films abstraction of relationships. They’re deconstructed as these odd, unnatural things rather than the innate connections they’re so often painted as, and Rappaport elucidates these ideas with his off-kilter, brightly lit sets combined with tableaux reminiscent of classicist paintings, basically as a big joke but still intriguing enough to actually promulgate interesting ideas. In any other hands maybe this film wouldn’t work at all, but Rappaport pulls it off.

doctor love DOCTOR LOVEEEEE

Yvonne Rainer-style, but with a poet's allusiveness in place of the academic subtexts; references to Orpheus and Eurydice's botched jail-break seems like a pretty slight hook to hang a whole movie on, but that symbolic structure might gain some depth if I were to rewatch or think more about it. This didn't exactly... charm... me the way it seems to have done for many people; I liked Casual Relations better than this one. I'm still down for his performer-based collage movies, though!

EDIT, three years later: Well, now that I've actually watched a bunch of them,maybe not so much.

thats what i need... a myth to live by

Forgot how infatuated I am with Rappaport's modality: transgression achieved through dislocated praxis; silences accentuated by the occasional digression, that, in end, serve to create the beautiful (and deeply affecting) mosaic that is this turbulent rendering of transient slice-of-life.

Can't believe its taken me this long to start diving into Rappaport.

next level
trus!

next level
trus!

Nice

The story, sets and acting are all great, but rappaport’s sense of pacing and silence is so mood killing that it stands out as a major Achilles heel of the production

Raul Ruiz but American soap opera.. I’m here for it?

CuckQUEEN!!!

Holy shit this could have been made today.

Feels like Mark couldn’t get a novel published so he just had it read aloud over some images instead.

Criminally under-seen and under-appreciated. I'm at a loss for words.

are all of rappaport's joints this incest-y? lmao

anyways, goes for a much different visual style than Local Color, but a lot of the ideas are the same: detached dialogue that still has ample feeling and sorrow in it, feels like a michael snow movie come to life in some ways. i've been wanting to see movies like this for a while and i'm glad that these have been absolutely delivering so far; this smorgasbord of faux-kitchen sink realism is one of my platonic ideals.

at the same time, neither of the ones i've seen are favorites really, but they are so strong that i'm gonna definitely go through his filmo.