Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

 

Perhaps John Cassavetes’ strangest and most inexhaustible film, Love Streams confounds any notion of the director as being primarily an excavator of everyday emotional truths, embracing the heightened artificiality evident in all his work and pushing it to the point of near psychosis, such that by the end, characters are motivated by dreams (and further, dreams taking the form of operas) as much as by realities, and a character that appeared to be a dog temporarily reveals itself as a man. The title refers to the preoccupation of Gena Rowlands’ character, Sarah, with love as a “continuous stream” that doesn’t stop, a philosophy that as she enacts it consumes her in excessive behaviour and impulsiveness and recurring breakdown; Cassavetes plays her brother, Robert, whose relationship with love, or with humanity more generally, might better be represented as one of endless pivoting and zig-zaging, losing himself in shallow or short-lived connections, his self-absorption (albeit shrouded by a general air of formality and courtliness) often tumbling into cruelty (on being tasked with looking after his eight-year-old son for the first time ever, he flies the kid to Vegas and leaves him alone in a hotel room all night). The film’s final act represents a series of high-stakes substitutions: Robert now forcibly alone, constrained by a somewhat absurd bunch of animal care obligations, symbolically further isolated by darkness and storm; Sarah heading off to spend the night with a guy she just met, with some supposed new understanding with her divorced husband lying beyond; the fabric of the film seemingly heaving and splitting. Much of the film was shot in Cassavetes/Rowlands’ own house, evidencing a lived-in solidity that couldn’t likely have come from Robert, but for everything that feels strangely personal, the film provides an offsetting cavernous abstraction (confining its glimpses of Sarah’s European trips to concrete hellholes); it sometimes feels like the entire human condition flows (or snarls) through the film at one point or another.