8th March 2008
Love Streams
John Cassavetes 1984
Dear TL and David,
On reflection, I still feel I have a more positive response to this last Cassavetes viewing than either of you seemed to. It’s an unbalanced film in some respects, granted. And it is flawed by farcical elements. But I think it’s interesting all the same.
The film seemed to me to pivot round that point towards the end when Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) buys animals and brings these to Robert (John Cassavetes) Harman’s house – doing this, apparently, in order to encourage Harman to lead a more stable life. The absurdity of this moment in the narrative, in which she arrives back in a taxi with two small horses, a goat, and various birds, suggests that the film is sliding hopelessly into some kind of comedy. However, as Sarah Lawson has a catatonic fit induced by Harman’s negative reaction to her gift of animals, and as the weather changes from Californian sunshine to the mother of all storms, the film too seems to go though a transformation.
The abiding image is of Cassavetes’ character in his sou’ wester (was it made of straw?), viewed standing in plaintive isolation through the rain-dashed window, by the jukebox. Apart from everything else, his ambiguous relations to Sarah, seem less ambiguous from this point. Surely it could only be a brother abandoned this way by a sister who promises her devotion and then goes swanning off with the first cowboy?
As we concluded before, the film has his isolation – and hers – as a primary theme. But I think the peculiar force with which this theme presents itself in the image of Harman in his rain-gear, was achieved only with that long detour through his apparent high-living (a detour that makes up most of the film). This all looks to me like quintessential Cassavetes. What’s presented could be an account of that moment where the ‘research’ stops – where his philandering activities have to come to an end and he is faced again with the necessity to work, writing having to be approached through solitude. (I’ve been thinking again this week about a poem by George Mackay Brown – partly in relation to the theme of ’silence’ that we are perhaps going to get on to shortly – called ‘The Poet‘ – the idea of ’staring’ as work, and the idea of the poet’s work as ‘interrogation of silence’)
The flaw with with this theory is that it would require Harman to be a more serious writer than he perhaps came across. But, then, we are not given much of an insight into his writing – we don’t really know what kind of thing he does except through comments from other characters, who might be good judges or not.
March 10, 2008 at 9:50 pm |
Hello N & TL
Though my first viewing of it was certainly ambivalent, I also think its a really interesting work – indulgent, messy, but certainly not unaffecting. I would totally agree that the film is quintessential Cassavetes, but it seemed to me to be working with a different kind of intensity to some of the other films we’ve seen – maybe Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Husbands. This film seemed to work in a more openly contrived mode, if you see what I mean. It seemed intentionally overblown, bombastic, verging at times on the ham-fisted, but of course these very qualities worked well as part of the portrayal of the damage and overload/paucity of the characters evidenced throughout the film. It fed into the super-saturation of the Gena Rowlands character especially, such as in the absurdist dream sequences – the opera mawkishness; the relentless, cringeworthy performance by the pool followed by the absurd, Buster Keaton high dive into the swimming pool! Perhaps this kind of ‘emblematic’ positioning – I’m not quite sure what I mean here – which didn’t seem something that emerged from character/actor-driven interaction, owes more to the original screenplay material that the film is based on…?
I was also thinking about the bold strokes of some of the imagery too – for example when Harman’s son smashes his head on the door of his mother’s house after the rather unsuccessful trip to Vegas, which of course harks back to the moment in the film when a drunken Cassavetes, crawling all over the young woman (was this the dancer?), falls down the stone steps outside her home. Both father and son emerge bleeding profusely from these incidents – both of the them incidentally desperately trying to get in, to reach sanctuary (and it might be said, though not without coughing hard, that both were running away from Harman) – and the wound in both cases seems suitably emphatic, over-the-top, with thick gloopy blood, from a Old Master crucifixion, streaming down their foreheads and over their faces.
I would totally agree with you about the moment of transition in the film and the fact that the absurdist arrival of the menagerie is, so to speak, the final straw. Also, all of the ark connotations we talked about, and Cassavetes looking like some mad Ahab figure (in fact I think I remember a shot when he was on the terrace of the house, amid the storm, as if he were on a ship’s bridge, fighting at the wheel) were really interesting. This was the point where, for me, it seemed the film was on the verge of imploding as it threw in countless half-formed allusions to a cinematic genres, over a few shots, always on a tangent & never quite engaged with – the disaster movie, the supernatural thriller, the medical drama, etc. It was really unnerving – and that’s probably my main response to the film – it threw me into indecision. Probably no better thing to say about a movie in some respects.
I’m still not sure about the appearance of the naked man in the living room – it seems there’s an opinion that the ‘man was the dog’, or so I’ve read on imdb, and somehow connected with the softening of Harman’s character, but I’m not sure. Maybe the dog was a mirror or something. It’s also quite interesting to think that, in some ways, Rowlands’ character somehow remained unchanged – in fact just goes to sleep and has a further false dawn in her dreams – and so Harman is left all the more isolated since she has not (after having been the one to have ‘gone too far’) led the way after all.