Review of Love Streams (1984) by Aaron W — 12 Mar 2009

Yet another beautiful, sincere, passionate, meaningful, depressing, hilarious, and absolutely stunning work of art from Mr. John Cassavetes. Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes play sister and brother and it's one of the best on-screen relationships I've ever seen. Rowlands plays Sarah, a woman who believes that love is a continuous unending stream which results in confusion and disorientation when her husband decides to divorce her and her daughter decides to stay with her father. With nowhere else to go, she decides to stay with her brother Robert for a while. Robert (Cassavetes) is a very successful writer who always keeps a bottle of booze and several women (usually prostitutes) around to keep himself happy. He's a sleazy, smooth, asshole with at least two ex-wives and kid he doesn't even know.

I was surprised to see Cassavetes play around a little with the this one. The story, while not at all a typical narrative, is a bit more structured than any of the other films of his I've seen and there are also some very strange, but absolutely effective, fantasy/dream scenes that are very atypical of his work. It's definitely not a detriment to the work, and actually is quite insightful into the mind of Sarah. I loved the musical dream at the end.

Two very small and ignorable problems. First, Sarah is undeniably similar to Mable from A Woman Under the Influence. They're not the same character at all as they do have distinguishing characteristics, but it does feel at times that Rowlands isn't sure which character she's playing with one scene in particular ( light a cigarette, drink a beer, and wait) coming straight from the other film. Second problem, the music was at times kind of awkward. Most of the time it worked great, but there were a couple instances, especially at the end, where it seemed a bit out of place.

Again though, this film is a masterpiece and those two very minor issues I had didn't detract from the experience at all. In fact, this is likely to rise pretty high in my ranking of Cassavetes' films and that's saying a lot as I truly love everything of his I've seen.

Wonderful.