EFFECTIVELY HIS LAST FILM, LOVE STREAMS PICKS UP ON ALL OF CASSAVETES’ WORK WHILE GIVING IT A STRANGE, OTHERWORLDLY DIMENSION.
The subject is love, the failure to give it, the pressure of receiving it, and the context is again the family. The main characters are Robert (Cassavetes), a writer who has insulated himself from his immediate family, and Sarah (Gena Rowlands), who is in the process of obtaining a divorce but is still showering those nearest her with the overbearing love that seems partly responsible for driving them apart. Robert and Sarah are, though it’s never explicitly stated, brother and sister, and she eventually comes to stay with him, exploding his hermetic world. For all the emotional chaos, Love Streams is, like Opening Night, carefully structured and even formally shot. Its reflections on the impossible demands of love, and the insatiable need for it, are shot through with fantasy sequences and even, in a final storm sequence, strange shadows of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.