Yesterday was a good day in a very upsetting week. My copies of Love Streams arrived, via Amazon. It’s a major moment for Cassavetes fans, some of whom have never had the opportunity to even see what is considered his final film (never released on DVD until now.)
Dennis Lim has contributed a beautiful essay, included in the Criterion booklet, and it is now live on the Criterion site. Lim writes of Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) and Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes), the two main characters in Love Streams:
The hopeless misalignment between these two almost soul mates, the sense of push-pull and perpetual interruptus in their exchanges, gives the film both a deep, lingering sorrow and the syncopated rhythm of a farce. The instability of the characters is contagious; the world itself seems mutable. Sarah’s hallucinations and visions—running Jack over with a car, trying to make her family laugh with joke-store props—repeatedly bleed into the film’s reality, never clearly signposted as fantasies. Adding to the dreamlike quality, some of the sets, like the nightclub and the train stations Sarah passes through, are bare-bones to the point of abstraction. And if there was ever any doubt that “realist” is too limiting a tag for Cassavetes, the comic register tilts fully into the surreal in the final act, when Sarah buys out an entire animal shelter and brings home two miniature horses, a goat, a duck, a parakeet, several chickens, and a dog named Jim.
I love his point that “realism” is too limiting a tag. Cassavetes has never, not once, struck me as a realist.
Lim also observes:
So many of Cassavetes’s other films are domestic disaster movies; the mood in Love Streams is post apocalyptic.
