If love is a stream, then it is in continuous motion. It pours past small obstructions, catching and letting go. When it pulses it is outside of any reason, and beyond any control; it is unafraid of any frictions that may hold it back or tighten it or forcibly carve out a new course. If love is a stream, and there is such belief in Love Streams (1984), then love mustn’t ever stop.
I suppose one could say the film is about love; what one needs of it and how one enacts it. And they could also say that it is about loneliness and desperation and self-destruction. And these would all be correct. But, almost more potently, the film is about the discomfort which lies in between these conditions, where we find ourselves in chaos, floundering at intervals of multiple affections.
Of course, with Sarah (Gena Rowlands), this is very clear. Her emotion is high and she sings loud her understanding of love, begging her ex-husband (Seymour Cassel) to sing the same. He does not. This upsets her. In fact, she is told by a shrink that she loves her husband and family too much; she should, instead of becoming overly absorbed with the custody battle of her child, go to Europe, see the world. She does. This upsets her.
But in the hopes of finding balance—she is “almost not crazy,” she says—Sarah finds her way to the Los Angeles home of her brother Robert (John Cassavetes), whom it is clear she has not seen in some time. They embrace under luggage and fur coats in the taxi as she pulls up to his front door. This electrifies her.
He lives hedonistically, almost opposite to Sarah, in a home with many young women: research, I suppose, for his next novel on nightlife. He prompts lines out of them, finding the character to cling to. To seek out life, he does so only through short spurts of pleasure and booze and women and women and women. But of any more than such, he is in total void.
This is how the symbiosis functions. How Sarah and Robert will try to, through each others’ faults, find the stability they require.
Love Streams, directed by Cassavetes, was his last film (barring, of course, Big Trouble) before his passing. As he waves goodbye in his character Robert to character Sarah, he does so simultaneously out of character as Cassavetes to Rowlands, his wife and eternal muse.
In both cases, nothing can be done to stop the goodbye: an overflowing woman in need of her family and a cancer diagnosis. The madness which occurs in life interferes with the love stream. They sway within it, here, knowing of its course. But as the whole crux of the stream, the love still finds a way to carry on.