Love Streams at Northwest Film Forum

John Cassavetes’s 1984 masterpiece Love Streams, his final independent film (and not available on DVD outside France), opened last Friday for a rare theatrical engagement at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill. On the first night of the week-long run, Richard Jensen of Clear Cut Press introduced the movie; guitarist Calvin Johnson strummed a couple of offbeat songs, relating a charming anecdote along the way about making prank phone calls to Leonard Maltin’s house (to protest Taxi Driver‘s receipt of a mere two-star rating); and in a curious decision, there was NWFF Executive Director Michael Seiwerath branding Love Streams as a movie “that can only be thought of as a failure.” More on this last detail in a moment.

Toward a definition of why he considers it his favorite film, Jensen spoke of the “uncharacteristic rhythms” of Love Streams, of “the way the music moves the movie.” Jensen acknowledged the songs of composer Bo Harwood, all unpublished apparently, as seminal contributions, but most of Jensen’s pre-screening talk consisted of holding his cell phone up to a mic, and playing back a saved voice mail message from the Cassavetes connoisseur Ray Carney, who had called Jensen earlier in the day to say that, on such short notice, he couldn’t locate contact information for Harwood. And so those of us gathered listened to Carney’s disembodied voice sing the praises of this “completely untutored” songwriter who can’t read music, but whose haunting, odd melodies perfectly accompanied the late auteur’s visions. It was impossible to hear most of what Carney had to say, but given how many months had elapsed between programming Love Streams (it was announced as far back as February) and the opening, Jensen’s introduction was a bit too fly-by-night. Wouldn’t it have been a richer experience to have a statement from Harwood on the process of making music with and for Cassavetes? In the past, Northwest Film Forum has hosted Hal Hartley, Guy Maddin, Michael Almereyda – to name a few. How difficult, with some advance planning, could it have been to bring Harwood in for this event?

It’s what’s on the screen, of course, that ultimately matters, and in this regard, Love Streams was no letdown. I had seen the film a handful of times before, but always on television, never in a movie theatre. If its faults are less obscured within a larger canvas, the movie’s virtues are heightened that much more as well. Although Cassavetes, in such works as Opening Night, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, had long been a master of shifting disparate tones with the greatest of ease, here he pushes further in alternating passages of slapstick comedy and domestic tragedy. And not least among the writer-director’s accomplishments, Love Streams gives Gena Rowlands the funniest, most powerful film role she has ever had.

As Sarah Lawson, a middle-aged beauty who does everything to excess, whether in the amount of luggage she takes to Europe, or in choosing a pet for her brother, or – perhaps best of all – in wearing a black evening gown with red high heels for a night at a bowling alley, Rowlands taps into comic wellsprings that none of her subsequent directors have utilized.

When we first encounter Sarah, she’s meeting her soon to be ex-husband Jack (Seymour Cassel) to sign divorce papers. They’ve gathered, with their 13-year-old daughter Debby (a superbly bratty Risa Blewitt), a female judge and two male attorneys for what ought to be a quick legality, but Sarah has grander notions. Defying the arranged joint-custody agreement, she makes her case as to why she’s more fit to raise her daughter: “You see, we go to a lot of funerals… You might say that’s what I do… People like Debby and me to be with them when they’re not feeling well, because we’re cheerful.” Rowlands’ body language throughout this speech is impeccable: She tends to tilt her head slightly as she calmly berates Cassel, “When people are temporarily insane, like Jack here,” as if to imply an understood conspiracy. Then there’s her wardrobe. Sarah never wears casual clothing – she’s always in tailored jackets and skirts, her long blond curls are styled voluptuously, her lips and fingernails painted red. Rowlands uses all this, plus her habit of twisting up her smile, to create a full portrait of a woman whose chief source of strength stems from romantic fantasies. And in the redemptive powers of those dreams.

In the film’s most brilliant sequence, Sarah, having fully estranged Jack and Debby, bets that she can make them laugh, and thus regain their affection. She’s arranged a table of props next to the swimming pool in their backyard, and she subjects them to slapstick gags to which they refuse to react. This is some of Cassel’s finest acting. He stands there squirted with water and cream, yet takes it stoically. In an earlier bit, risky and exhilarating for entirely different reasons, Sarah asks a porter at a British railway station to place a call to Jack in Chicago. The voices of Sarah and the porter overlap with a tracking shot that runs along the fenced-in side of the Lawsons’ posh Chicago digs (though it’s all too clearly Southern California), past a garden in bloom, past tennis equipment everywhere. “I’m almost not crazy,” Sarah ebulliently announces, and Jack hangs up. From this, Cassavetes cuts to a gory insert in which an old junker of a car, barreling down a dusty road from out of nowhere, crashes into Jack and Debby, killing them. Then we see that it’s Sarah driving the car, as she steps out to examine the bloodied corpses of her husband and daughter. It’s a fantastic juxtaposition, a stunning comment on the rage we have at our families.

There are also excellent performances by Diahnne Abbott, the child actor Jakob Shaw (who, if the IMDB is to be trusted, never made another film), and by Cassavetes himself, as Robert Harmon, a writer, a collector of women, a hard-drinking debauch whose tuxedos manage to look rumpled and ash-littered even when freshly pressed. (The movie unintentionally memorializes the by-gone days of smoking indoors.) It’s Abbott’s voice that we hear briefly at the start, while the screen is still black, wordlessly cooing. She plays a lounge singer, and Cassavetes stages a couple of nightclub sequences for her that Adam Hart, who programmed Love Streams for Northwest Film Forum, told me were like something out of a Warhol movie. In the first of these, Abbott, with a pair of back-up singers, impassively croons a grotesque Andrews Sisters parody about “booger wooger,” a tune that sounds like a reject from the repertoire of Bette Midler and the Harlettes. Abbott looks smashing, however, her cafe con leche complexion offset by a white-sequined red dress, and as she sings, a drag queen in a low-cut gown of midnight blue vamps toward Robert at the bar; when that scene cuts to our first glimpse of Debby, the girl wears a chaste strand of pearls over a blouse that’s the exact shade of blue as the drag queen’s get-up. Coincidence?

In the five years since I last saw the out-of-print VHS edition of Love Streams, I had forgotten about the screwball comedy struggle between Cassavetes and Abbott inside her cramped, junky car. (Everyone drives a junker in this movie, except for the cabbies.) Cassavetes sets their tussle to the solo wailing of a baritone sax, a sequence that pops with him tumbling down a flight of cement steps, then Abbott’s deadpan capper: “A perfect ending to a lovely evening.” Diahnne Abbott makes a style of tentativeness, somewhat in the way that the young Nancy Allen did in her early pictures with Brian De Palma, though without the simpering joy that Allen took in naughtiness. The year before Love Streams, Abbott had appeared as Robert De Niro’s girlfriend in The King of Comedy; looking back, it’s hard to believe this beautiful actress never had the cinematic career she deserved.

Shaw’s midpoint performance as Albie Swanson, the never-before-met 8-year-old son from one of Robert’s innumerable ex-girlfriends, belongs on another plane altogether. The boy, dropped off in Robert’s care overnight, takes an immediate dislike to his dad’s houseful of hookers and hangers-on, and he bolts. These images of Albie, a miserable expression on his pudgy lips, running for escape through the halls of a large, unfamiliar house are peculiarly frightening. Much of the movie is photographed at close range, and it’s dazzling to see the wide-angle shot of Albie running along an open road, the camera pulling backwards from his oncoming figure. And then this with the forward pull of the camera as Robert speeds in his car after him. Shaw registers so much in his face – anguish, boredom, resignation.

Part of what’s impressive about the Albie scenes is how Cassavetes fuses the extremes of reconciliation and rejection. In a Vegas hotel on the morning after Robert’s abandonment of him (left on his own, the boy passes the time by looking out the windows of their suite), Albie, as any child would, begs to be taken home to his mother, and Robert snarls, “Didn’t I tell you I was gonna stay out all night?” The kid burrows himself affectionately into Robert, in the way young children will try to divine sense out of even the most erratic behavior from their parents.

I’ll agree with Richard Jensen that Bo Harwood’s original songs, which run the gamut from jazz to rock to a sort of a chamber opera piece, are absolute marvels of complementing the characters’ internal states. There’s a tantalizingly brief shot of Sarah striding through Robert’s house at night during a rainstorm. The cinematographer Al Ruban views her from a distance, from out in the downpour, as flashes of lightning illumine the windows, and Harwood scores this to a few seconds of dark, brooding Brit-pop, but it’s his own “I’ll Leave It Up To You,” heard again in the film’s final scene, when Cassavetes famously waves goodbye with that wilted sombrero. By contrast, when Robert dances around with Margherita, a matronly lady dolled-up in an elaborate white toga with garlands of flowers tucked into her feathery, auburn hair, the soundtrack swings with the jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon singing “I’m Almost in Love with You,” a tune that sounds like an old standard, but was in fact co-written by Cassavetes and Harwood. (Margaret Abbott is a treat in this scene, especially when she says in her high, girlish voice, “Oh, Robert, I’m having such a good time.”) And in the most ambitious musical staging, a ballet of a mother and father clashing over the love and loyalty of their child, a grand piano repeats staccato block chords as a motif for the father’s struggle and need for control.

The movie succeeds on so many levels, and is so adventurous formally, that it strikes me as unfair and inappropriate for the Forum’s Executive Director, Michael Seiwerath, to preface Jensen by labeling the movie “a failure,” and worse still, after the screening, to ask for a show of hands from the audience of those who disliked the movie as much as he did. Seiwerath seemed uninterested in other viewpoints, but never explicated why the movie fails for him. Not only did this waste time, it likely intimidated viewers who would speak in its favor. At one point, I sidled up to Adam Hart and asked him to say something to counter Seiwerath’s propaganda. He said he would, believing as I did that there would be an opportunity to do so. There wasn’t. As soon as Calvin Johnson finished performing, Seiwerath thundered, “Thank you all for coming…” thereby ending any chance for coherent discussion of an important, still largely neglected work. – NPT

Initially published at GreenCine: lovestreams.