Film
10.11.24
Love Streams Melissa Anderson

. . . and love stops, and sustains, and continues in fits and starts, in John Cassavetes’s 1984 comedy-drama starring the director-actor
and Gena Rowlands.

John Cassavetes as Robert Harmon and Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

Love Streams, directed by John Cassavetes, screening October 12, 2024, at Roxy Cinema, 2 Sixth Avenue, New York City

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“I hate entertainment,” John Cassavetes once proclaimed. Cheap melodrama, predictable beats, tidy resolutions, uncomplicated characters: all were anathema to the filmmaker, whose oeuvre, although dense with vivid incident and indelible detail, burrows inward, probing tumultuous interior states. This emotional disquiet often stems from the effects of love (whether platonic, familial, or romantic) on those who express it too freely or too sparingly, on those who are deranged or restored by it (often one and the same thing). Cassavetes anatomized the enormous, unwieldy theme of how intimacy is achieved, sustained, or avoided altogether with painstaking care, never more so than in Love Streams (1984), the penultimate of his twelve movies and his last great work.

Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

The revival screening of Love Streams at Roxy Cinema (which will present the film on 35mm) concludes its tribute to Gena Rowlands, who died this past August, at the age of ninety-four. Married to Cassavetes for almost thirty-five years (their union ended with his death, in 1989), Rowlands performed in seven of his films; in two, she acted opposite her spouse. In Opening Night (1977), his magnificent, high-wire backstager, she stars as mercurial actress Myrtle Gordon, whose latest play reunites her with Cassavetes’s Maurice, Myrtle’s ex-lover off-stage and her husband on-. In Love Streams, Rowlands and Cassavetes are sister and brother, though their relationship isn’t made clear until well into the film’s second half.

John Cassavetes as Robert Harmon and Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

In fact, their characters don’t even intersect until the one-hour mark, when she arrives unexpectedly at his house for a short stay. Before their reunion, Cassavetes’s Robert Harmon and Rowlands’s Sarah Lawson operate in wildly divergent realms. He is a successful, dissipated, single writer in Los Angeles; she an emotionally fragile woman going through a wrenching divorce from her husband, Jack (Seymour Cassel), and arguing for full custody of their thirteen-year-old daughter, Debbie (Risa Blewitt). Robert thrives on chaos, his shambolic existence abundantly on display in the first scene: sporting a rumpled tux (who knows when he’s last changed his clothes), a bruised eye, and a bandaged hand, he walks through his Hollywood Hills home (Cassavetes and Rowlands’s own, shared with their three children), strewn with liquor bottles and other party detritus and bustling with comely young women, whom he has assembled for a group Q&A, research for his next book. “Tell me what a good time is,” he asks his guests; having spent his entire life devoted to sybaritic pursuits, Robert now seems incapable of answering the question himself. In sharp contrast with this kinetic milieu, Sarah is introduced in a sterile, somber hearing room, where she announces to the judge overseeing the terms of her daughter’s custody, “I have a problem: I love my family.” That trouble only intensifies when Debbie insists on living with her father.

Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

For Sarah, love is—or should be—an infinite resource. “Love is a stream. It is continuous. It doesn’t stop,” she tells her shrink (drolly played by Rowlands’s real-life older brother, David; family members often appear in Cassavetes’s films). The therapist maintains otherwise (“Oh, no. It does stop”), his words borne out by Jack’s gutting reply to his ex-wife when she buoyantly announces over the phone that she’s “almost not crazy now”: “I just don’t care.” (Sarah might be thought of as a more lucid Mabel, Rowlands’s unstable character in Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence from 1974; unlike Sarah, though, Mabel continues to be cherished by her husband and kids even during her most disturbed episodes.) Likewise, the havoc wrought by Robert’s terror of commitment—multiple failed marriages, children who are strangers to him, an instinctual retreat once Susan (Diahnne Abbott), a singer he’s trying to woo, expresses her feelings for him—spectacularly demonstrates the results of his parsimoniousness with love.

John Cassavetes as Robert Harmon and Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

Cassavetes asserted that with Love Streams, which he liberally adapted from a play by Ted Allan, he was “trying to make a film about people and their problems—what their real problems are, not something that is created by an accident of life but something we can control.” Sarah’s woes stem from giving too much of herself and Robert’s from too little, and most of the poignancy of Love Streams—and a significant amount of its humor—emerges from their attempts, no matter how small or misguided, to make changes. After Sarah’s psychologist advises her to travel to Europe (to do anything, really, to stop focusing so much on Jack and Debbie), the next scene hilariously shows her following that advice, importuning an employee at a train station in Paris to help her with her mountain of luggage. He speaks no English, so Sarah makes up her own Esperanto—“J’ai have muchas baggage”—before thinking that a Pepe Le Pew accent might break the language barrier (“Listen to me. Leesten to me!”). When an ex-wife shows up at Robert’s house with their eight-year-old son, Albie (Jakob Shaw)—not seen by his dad since his birth—and asks her former husband to look after the kid for the weekend, the debauchee tries to rise to the occasion: asking the boy if he’d like a drink, Robert pours Albie a Heineken.

Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams. Courtesy Roxy Cinema.

Aptly, Love Streams is a movie of tremendous fluidity. It proceeds seamlessly but unpredictably: with one cut, we go from Robert’s at-home fact-finding mission with his nubile informants to an extreme close-up of Susan, about to launch into a cabaret version of Bob Marley’s “Kinky Reggae” at a cavernous club populated by nattily attired gay men and transwomen. Convinced that her brother just needs something cute and cuddly to learn how to love, Sarah returns to Robert’s house in a cab—with a goat, a duck, a parakeet, chickens, and two miniature horses. Occasionally the narrative breaks, and we enter Sarah’s fantasies and dreams, including one structured as a full-blown opera about her reconciliation with her husband and daughter. The reverie, replete with an orchestra and a corps of little-girl ballerinas, is soaring, sublime. But perhaps the most transcendent moment in Cassavetes’s film captures a much more quotidian action: the hug shared by Robert and Sarah when she first shows up in his driveway. Their deep embrace manifests Sarah’s utopian beliefs about love, that tight clasping performed by two people who knew a little something about the subject.

Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.

. . . and love stops, and sustains, and continues in fits and starts, in John Cassavetes’s 1984 comedy-drama starring the director-actor and Gena Rowlands.
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