“Love is a stream, it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop”

John Cassavetes is unquestionably one of the most important filmmakers to ever work in the medium – and through the course of working through his career, I’ve grown particularly fond of him for a variety of reasons, all of which can easily be found converging in Love Streams, which was for all intents and purposes his swan song (we don’t talk about the aptly-titled Big Trouble here). His work reflects a profound understanding of the human condition, filtered through the mind of a director who has always provoked deep and insightful conversations into abstract existential issues that are somehow both ethereal and grounded, making his films some of the most poignant of the New Hollywood era, and extraordinarily resonant to the present era, where so many filmmakers sample from his unique social and cultural vision. Love Streams is one of his pinnacle works, a fiercely compelling, character-driven drama that features many of the director’s finest qualities, such as a deeply human story that never falters from being extraordinarily authentic, as well as the ambitious approach to the subject that we’ve come to expect from his work. A powerful film that burrows deep into the most visceral, raw nucleus of existence and extracts some of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful commentary ever put on film, there’s very little doubt that this is a remarkable work of cinema, and one of the many films Cassavetes made that could stake a legitimate claim for his masterpiece, an impressive achievement considering how some of his other work were watershed moments for independent and auteur-driven arthouse cinema. Everything that made him such an incredible artist is present here, and the director takes on a challenging subject while touching on some of the cornerstone concepts that defined his broader career and informed his unique vision. It is so difficult to avoid unleashing nothing but effusive praise on this incredible film, especially when Cassavetes is one of the many filmmakers that made me truly fall in love with cinema all those years ago when I first encountered his beautifully tender approach to humanity and its various challenges – but even putting aside the personal admiration I have for him, it is difficult to deny the exquisite mastery he brings to this brutally honest, bittersweet voyage to the very heart of the human condition.

Robert Harmon (Cassavetes) and Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) are siblings that live parallel lives, joined only by their familial bond. He’s a wealthy writer of popular romance novels who ironically relishes in his single life, after his two previous marriages failed dismally (which makes his career as a professional romantic somewhat dubious), undoubtedly the result of his philandering ways. She’s a lonely woman who has a habit of travelling around the country and visiting the elderly and sick relatives of her friends, while concurrently going through a contentious divorce, whereby her husband (Seymour Cassel) continuously proves to make her life difficult by demanding everything, including custody of their only daughter, who is herself growing weary of her mother’s instability. It is at this very critical moment in their lives that both Robert and Sarah are made aware of the finite nature of existence – both are in the throes of middle-age and are not getting anywhere meaningful, substituting serious introspection with carnal desire and inconsequential affairs, which lead to further self-destructive behaviour. They somehow find their way to each again for the first time in years, reuniting as a way of showing support to the other, but also to work through their own individual problems. Over the course of a few days, they find their radically different personalities intertwining, while uncovering some stark similarities between them that prove that they have very similar perceptions of the world. Sarah’s mental state continues to unravel, with her insistence on her dreams being signifiers of reality constantly being the bane of her brother’s existence, who in turns finds himself struggling with his own indecisive nature, caught between continuing his playboy tendencies or settling down with any of the charming women who throw themselves at him, not realizing that beneath the debonair charm and willingness to hand out large amounts of money, there is a broken man in search of something far more profound than anything that can be found in the various nightclubs that he frequents. Their lives are in pieces, but with the right support and willingness to work together, Robert and Sarah might be able to put themselves back together.

The key to understanding what made Cassavetes such an extraordinary director, and one of the true pioneers of auteur-driven independent cinema, involves considering the themes simmering just below the main subject matter that propels most of the film. On the surface, Love Streams is another one of the director’s suburban dramas, a return to some of his previous films, such Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz and A Woman Under the Influence, insofar as it focuses on middle-class malaise and the crippling psychological challenges many ordinary people conceal under a thin veneer of normality. However, as we venture deeper into this film, as is the case for everything Cassavetes made, we discover that there is something more complex underlying Love Streams, a very simple set of ideas that manifest through a quietly resilient exploration of the human spirit, carefully-curated by a director whose entire career was built from the foundation of understanding the various intricacies of existence that are simply not found in the more mainstream fare that existed around this time. A pioneer of independent cinema, Cassavetes always kept his stories at the fundamentally human level, which is the precise reason why he is revered as one of the defining figureheads in an artistic movement that still continues to pay homage to him, often without realizing what a trailblazer he actually was. As evident throughout Love Streams, there’s a complexity to even the most simple of existences, where the small challenges individuals face often compound in unexpected ways, and coalesce in anything from a minor mid-life crisis to serious psychosis, and which forms the basis for the majority of this film, where Cassavetes avoids exploiting these ideas, always being remarkably sensitive when touching on serious issues, but still manages to leave a powerful imprint on the culture. It’s certainly easy to group this with some of the director’s previous dramas, not necessarily because they tread similar narrative territory, but rather due to their steadfast insistence on looking at the most vulnerable aspects of life and prioritizing a penetrating glimpse into the various human vicissitudes that many experience.

Love Streams is also a film that Cassavetes simply could not have made twenty-five years before when he was starting out as a filmmaker – while unquestionably talented from the outset (as indicated by his ambitious debut with Shadows, which launched more than just his career, but an entire movement), his style at the beginning of his filmmaking journey would not have resulted in such an extraordinary film. Love Streams required a pearl of weathered wisdom that came from decades working in the industry and experiencing life in a way that filters out the youthful optimism (some might say reckless naivete). Derived from the fact that this film is about two characters realizing that they’re on the other side of middle-age – they’re not quite old enough to be questioning their own mortality and rushing to make the most of whatever finite time they have left, but they’re certainly aware that their younger days are behind them. Love Streams is a film that is dependent entirely on the director reflecting back on certain issues that a younger artist would simply be incapable of conveying with such brutal honesty and insightful melancholy. There’s an aching despair that persists throughout the film, one borne from the frank and unwavering approach Cassavetes takes in exploring some very stark themes – it is a challenging film, especially in how it looks at the trials and tribulations of ordinary people realizing the depths of their own mediocrity and their last remaining attempts to atone without directly admitting their own weaknesses. He isn’t afraid to make his characters unlikable – in fact, much of his career was built out of humanizing some of the most disconcerting archetypes, whether its the mentally-fragile housewife, the self-centred actress or the vainglorious gambler, all of which have been the protagonists of some of the director’s previous films. Cassavetes was always intent on exploring the lives of broken characters, getting to the root of their daily challenges and finding common ground between these individuals and the wider world around them. He was a profoundly humanistic filmmaker, and it reached its apex with Love Streams, where his striking compassion was at its most blunt, and most robust.

In realizing this story, Cassavetes once again relies on a common tendency to keep everything quite close to home, which becomes very literal in Love Streams. He casts himself as Robert, which is an understandable decision, not only since he was an extremely talented actor in his own right, but also considering how the character is inextricably linked to his own frame of mind, and required the kind of inherent understanding of the individual fragments of Robert’s mind. He’s extraordinary in the film, bringing the kind of tender resilience to the character of Robert that may not have been present had it been played by either a younger man or a more established star. Its a role written for a character actor, a position Cassavetes often thrived in when he was trying to finance his directorial efforts, and which he executes with the kind of precision rarely seen in situations where a director plays the lead in his own film. He reserves the attention that a star would’ve gotten in the role for his scene-partner for much of the film, Gena Rowlands, who is (as far as I’m concerned), one of the finest actresses to ever work in the medium. Cassavetes and Rowlands were a pair of artists that consistently brought out the best in each other, and managed to constantly find new ways to experiment with the creative dynamic that their professional and personal relationship unleashed throughout their collaborations. Playing the role of Sarah, Rowlands revisits some of the territories she had laid out previously, particularly in A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night, playing an ordinary woman trying to put together the pieces of a broken life, in the hopes of finding the resolution she’s desperately searching for. Her ability to command the screen with something as small as a single gesture proves how she mastered her craft, and in constructing these complex female characters that are not weighed down by anything other than their own existential quandaries, Rowlands established herself as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Love Streams was her last artistic collaboration with Cassavetes, and serves to be one of their very best – there’s a tenderness to how they convey the raw emotions, a sincerity that extended beyond simply playing roles as written on the page, that makes this a truly mesmerizing experience. The sign of a great actor is one that makes you forgot the world around you, while still making you aware of the reality embedded within it – and much like the contradiction of this statement, Rowlands proved to be both mythically ethereal and unflinchingly human.

The best descriptor for Cassavetes’ work is that he attempted to condense everything about life into two hours – and none of his films seem to encapsulate this better than Love Streams. While an established filmmaker by this point, the director was still an outsider, even if only in theory, which is reflective in the various choices he makes with this film, putting together a poignant exploration of human existence without resorting to the temptation of making a bold melodrama that would coerce audiences into feeling the manipulated emotions churned out by the mainstream machine. He was a filmmaker that kept true to his vision, and even with the resources he was offered, Cassavetes employed the same cinéma vérité style – not because he was defiant to the direction of the industry, but rather since it was the most truthful way to portray humanity as he saw it. Life isn’t particularly easy, regardless of where you are positioned on the socioeconomic hierarchy, and even for someone as wealthy as Robert, there are certainly challenges that manifest frequently. The central governing idea of Love Streams isn’t necessarily to convey a certain message or portray a particular progression of ideas – its an inherently descriptive film, one that seeks to capture the human spirit in a meaningful way. The bare, intimate style of filmmaking is certainly an area that has polarized audiences, many of whom don’t quite know how to respond to a film like Love Streams – it does venture into some more surreal territory at times, but do so in a way that doesn’t cause the jagged realism to lose its edge, but rather supplements it in a very unique way. Stylistically and narratively, Cassavetes’ forays into the mind of complex protagonists are simply incredibly powerful and unflinchingly important, and proof of his merits as one of the most essential filmmakers of his generation.

There’s an intangible quality to Cassavetes’ films that just cannot be put into words – raw, unbridled emotion that doesn’t settle for anything other than the most affecting poignancy ever committed to film. Love Streams is filled with a painfully beautiful understanding of existence, one that Cassavetes investigates through bare, earnest filmmaking that simply cannot be described in coherent terms. More than a piece of cinema, this film is an experience that is almost unmatched in its quiet resilience and deeply meaningful portrayal of darker issues, with Cassavetes grappling the line between misery and hope with unprecedented ease, showing them to be two sides of the same coin, and ultimately symbiotic in the experience of being alive. His work here is undeniably powerful, and through extracting an authentic sense of existence from a very simple but impactful story, the director is able to leave an indelible impression on the industry he helped define, even if inadvertently through refusing to play by the rules. It is so easy to idolize Cassavetes as a groundbreaking filmmaker in theory, but the sensation of experiencing his films, whether for the first time or on a revisitation, is truly something to behold. Love Streams is one of his most personal films, and undeniably one of his very best, the perfect quasi-conclusion to one of the finest and most revolutionary careers in cinema, made alongside one of the finest actresses to ever appear on the screen, giving one of her most layered, nuanced performances. Unforgettable, complex cinema at its finest, produced with heart and soul and the dedication that comes with a director fully in command of his craft, Love Streams is a masterful exploration of important issues executed with poise, elegance and undying devotion, to the medium and to the subject it explores.