What do vampires, Hollywood melodramas, porn films, the countdown of golden oldies, and drives down the highway with Mick Jagger on the radio have in common? Casual Relations knows. In Rappaport's dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities. The point is that we are all vampires–or being vampirized. We are all obsessed–or the object of someone else's obsession. We are all under somebody's thumb–to quote the Jagger lyric Rappaport uses–if we're not thumb-wrestling ourselves and pinning ourselves down. The short film within a film, A Vampire's Love, is one of the most brilliant (and hilarious) brief sequences in all of Rappaport's work. -Ray Carney