"Do you believe that love is a continuous stream?": Love Streams

I'm a little late to the game where John Casavetes is concerned.  In fact, I'm pretty late to the game where a lot of American Cinema is concerned, having spent a great deal of my life absorbing foreign classics and contemporaries from Japan, France, Sweden, Germany, and Russia.  However, I've been slowly making my way through his films and I must admit, the man had a style unlike any other film maker I've seen.  As consummately unique and whole in vision as any of Woody Allen's films, Love Streams is no exception to this, but is indeed an exceptional piece of work in the auteur's canon.

Love Streams concerns the fucked up lives of two siblings, Robert and Sarah, played by Cassavetes and wife Gena Rowlands, in the late middle ages who can't seem to get it together and don't seem to be particularly perturbed by that fact either.  With an improvisational and cinema verite like spin we are given a glimpse into the lives of these two characters in a profoundly honest way.  He does not glamorize the two, instead, shows us their ugly sides as flagrantly as their good sides, although the darkness seems to loom ever so close to the surface, threatening to consume them at any given moment.

I would like to note that I caught this film at work after the projectionist made, what he thought was, a joke about how "...we should be serving Gin and Valiums for this utterly depressing shite of a film."  I laughed outwardly, but inside I felt myself glaring.  If there's one thing I despise, it's a callously derisive approach to films with no regard to another person's preferences or taste.  Having already seen Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz I had made up my mind to see Love Streams regardless, but I couldn't get the damn statement out of my head.  Luckily, as with matters of taste, my own taste prevailed and I instead enjoyed the intense, funny, sometimes outrageously strange study of these two lonesome characters who can only seem to tolerate each other in a truly compassionate way.

The camera work in this film is top notch and it's subtly induced me to feel like I was almost watching a documentary a few times.  I would plunge into the lives of these people and then just as suddenly be transported to an elaborate and farcical dream sequence.  Rowlands plays neurosis in such a way in this film that I found myself staring wide eyed at some of the situations befalling the character.  It's this quality that defines her as such an amazing actress, her ability to take a character that is, basically, bat shit crazy and still make me love and worry for her.

Even with Cassavetes roguish and sometimes misogynistic portrayal as a man who seems to truly believe that "Well, love is dead." I couldn't help but to pity him.  It's part of his charm, this ability to simultaneously cause shock and adoration.  While not for everyone, it is impossible to deny the profound effect that Cassavetes had upon the women and men who would later rise up through the ranks as America's Independent Film Renaissance.  This is purportedly his truly final film, as his health began to decline in the coming years and he would be dead from cirrhosis of the liver five years after it's completion.  I saw a beautiful 35mm print, but you can also get it on Blu Ray from The Criterion Collection or watch it on their Hulu Plus Channel.