John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS (American Revival)

Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
John Cassavetes' final film, LOVE STREAMS, is both his most fully realized in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection and his most conventional in cinematic style. Working in front of the camera for the last time, he once again cast his wife Gena Rowlands in the female lead—a fitting public bow for their long collaboration. They play Robert and Sarah, a dysfunctional brother and sister—he's never learned to love and she loves too much—who lean on each other as their lives fall apart. LOVE STREAMS lacks anything that could be called an exposition despite the heaviest use of non-diegetic music and the only use of dream sequences in any of Cassavetes' work. We are dropped into the lives of an aging, drunk, womanizing, and wealthy writer and his clinically depressed, soon-to-be divorced sister, initially by following them separately on parallel paths and downward trajectories. Each sibling has a child that they make a genuine but clumsy attempt to bond with, but ultimately they prove unfit as parents. Sarah shows up on Robert's doorstep just as he's taking the 8 year-old son he's never met before on a weekend bender to Las Vegas. When he returns without his son, Cassavetes and Rowlands are left to act out the end of this tragedy. The story is somewhat secondary here, though, as the film functions as a recap of Cassavetes' previous directorial themes. Cassavetes' lonely artist is colored by a splash of personal regret (he had already been diagnosed with the liver cirrhosis that would kill him five years later). His sister, on the other hand, echoes the absurdist antics that Cassavetes was known for as a younger man, going further and further to keep everything cheery in the face of her own depression. Using one last script from her husband to show just what an amazing actress she is, Rowlands continually makes us forget her character's mental instability, only to unleash it again like a tantrum. For any fan of his films the use of Cassavetes and Rowlands' home as the primary set is both comforting and distressing. In color, we see all the rich, dark wood on the walls and the clutter of years filling up each room, scribbling the scent of John’s physical decline on every frame. As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding love and marriage. It is through understanding the pain of life that Cassavetes depicts on the screen that we gain greater appreciation for the joys of our own lives off it, not the other way around. (1984, 141 min, 35mm) JH - cine-file.info