Love Streams | |
---|---|
Directed by | John Cassavetes |
Screenplay by | Ted Allan John Cassavetes |
Based on | Love Streams by Ted Allan |
Produced by | Menahem Golan Yoram Globus |
Starring | Gena Rowlands John Cassavetes Diahnne Abbott Seymour Cassel |
Cinematography | Al Ruban |
Edited by | George C. Villaseñor |
Music by | Bo Harwood |
Distributed by | Cannon Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 141 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Love Streams is a 1984 American film directed by John Cassavetes, in what would be his final independent feature and penultimate directorial project. The film tells the story of a middle-aged brother (Cassavetes) and sister (Gena Rowlands) who find themselves relying on one another after being abandoned by their loved ones. [1]
The film was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Golden Bear. [2]
Undergoing a messy divorce from a husband and daughter tired of her continuously overwrought emotional states, Sarah Lawson visits her brother Robert Harmon, an alcoholic playboy and writer who is in a tenuous relationship with Susan, a professional singer, although he carefully avoids any real emotional commitment to anyone. Robert is visited by his ex-wife, who forces him to take care of their eight-year-old son, whom he has not seen since his birth, for 24 hours.
Robert's son is terrified by the hedonistic, decadent, womanizing world of his father and begs to be taken home following an overnight trip to Las Vegas filled with gambling and prostitutes. After dropping him off, Robert is beaten up by the boy's stepfather, after which his son testifies his love for Robert.
Fleeing the scene, Robert returns home to take care of his sister, his "best friend." Sarah tries with some success to curb the nihilistic self-destruction of Robert's life and simultaneously deal with her own depression and divorce. She buys him some farm animals in the hope he can give his love to them; Robert struggles between his intense desire to protect his sister and the challenge of accepting her freedom as the necessary cost of love. Finally, after a bizarre dream of being in an opera with her husband and daughter, Sarah feels ready to resume her life and possibly even get her family back, or not. Before Sarah walks away from the house in the middle of a storm as Robert looks on, he hallucinates that the dog she gave him has turned into a naked man. Robert laughs hysterically.
Love Streams is based on the 1980 play of the same name by Ted Allan, but the correlation between the screenplay and the play is minimal. In the stage production, the role of Robert Harmon was played by Jon Voight; Cassavetes took this role for the film version.
The visual style of the film is decidedly different from Cassavetes's other works; it contains no hand-held camera work (a trademark of his visual style). Much of it was shot inside Cassavetes' home.
Love Streams was originally released with a running time of 141 minutes. It was briefly available on videotape in the mid 1980s in a version cut to 122 minutes by the distributor; one scene was edited and several unusual visual effects (the insertion of black leader and jump cuts) were removed. In 2003, it was released on DVD in France (along with A Child Is Waiting ) in its entirety. The 141-minute version received an American DVD and Blu-ray release for the first time in 2014 as part of The Criterion Collection. [3]
The film was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Golden Bear. [2]
The film has a 100% positive rating based on 16 reviews from critics at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. [4]
Japanese film director Shinji Aoyama listed Love Streams as one of the Greatest Films of All Time in 2012. He said, "When I think about Cassavetes, I always feel happy. I feel glad that I like movies. I'm sure I will always feel this way until the day I die, and I intend to feel this way too. At the end of Love Streams, Cassavetes smiles as he sees the dog next to him, which turned into a naked man. I live my life always wishing I can smile like that." [5]
Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars, noting: "Viewers raised on trained and tame movies may be uncomfortable in the world of Cassavetes; his films are built around lots of talk and the waving of arms and the invoking of the gods... Sometimes (as in Husbands ) the wild truth-telling approach evaporates into a lot of empty talk and play-acting. In Love Streams, it works." [6]
In 2015 the BBC named the film the 63rd greatest American movie ever made. [7]
Mean Streets is a 1973 American crime drama film directed by Martin Scorsese, co-written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin, and starring Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. It was produced by Warner Bros. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 2, 1973, and was released on October 14. De Niro won the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as "Johnny Boy" Civello.
Shadows is a 1959 American independent drama film directed by John Cassavetes about race relations during the Beat Generation years in New York City. The film stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd as three black siblings, though only one of them is dark-skinned enough to be considered African American. The film was initially shot in 1957 and shown in 1958, but a poor reception prompted Cassavetes to rework it in 1959. Promoted as a completely improvisational film, it was intensively rehearsed in 1957, and in 1959 it was fully scripted.
A Woman Under the Influence is a 1974 American drama film written and directed by John Cassavetes, starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. Rowlands plays a housewife whose unusual behavior leads to conflict with her blue-collar husband (Falk) and family.
Virginia Cathryn "Gena" Rowlands was an American actress, whose career in film, stage, and television spanned nearly seven decades. A four-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner, she collaborated with her actor-director husband John Cassavetes in ten films, including A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980), both of which earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Opening Night (1977). She appeared in Woody Allen's Another Woman (1988), and her son Nick Cassavetes's film, The Notebook (2004). In 2021, Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, "The most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus is Gena Rowlands." In November 2015, Rowlands received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of her unique screen performances.
Gloria is a 1980 American neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by John Cassavetes. It tells the story of a gangster's former girlfriend who goes on the run with a young boy who is being hunted by the mob for information he may or may not have. It stars Gena Rowlands, Julie Carmen, Buck Henry, and John Adames.
John Nicholas Cassavetes was a Greek-American filmmaker and actor. He began as an actor in film and television before helping to pioneer modern American independent cinema as a writer and director, often self-financing, producing, and distributing his own films. He received nominations for three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and an Emmy Award.
Faces is a 1968 American drama film written, produced, and directed by John Cassavetes. It is his fourth directorial work. The film, shot in cinéma vérité-style, depicts the final stages of the disintegrating marriage of a middle-aged couple, played by John Marley and newcomer Lynn Carlin. Cassavetes regulars Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Fred Draper and Val Avery also star.
Raymond Carney is an American scholar and critic, primarily known for his work as a film theorist, although he writes extensively on American art and literature as well. He is known for his study of the works of actor and director John Cassavetes. He teaches in the Film and Television department of the Boston University College of Communication at Boston University and has published several books on American art and film.
Seymour Joseph Cassel was an American actor who appeared in over 200 films and television shows, with a career spanning over 50 years. He first came to prominence in the 1960s in the pioneering independent films of writer/director John Cassavetes. The first of these was Too Late Blues (1961), followed by Faces (1968), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a National Society of Film Critics Award. Cassel went on to appear in Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984). He also appeared in other notable films, including: Coogan's Bluff (1968), The Last Tycoon (1976), Valentino (1977), Convoy (1978), Johnny Be Good (1988), Mobsters (1991), In the Soup (1992), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), The Sleepy Time Gal (2001), Beer League (2006), and Fort McCoy (2011). Like Cassavetes, Wes Anderson frequently cast Cassel – first in Rushmore (1998), then in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and finally in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a 1976 American neo-noir crime film written and directed by John Cassavetes and starring Ben Gazzara. A rough and gritty film, this is the second of their three collaborations, following Husbands and preceding Opening Night. Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Morgan Woodward, Meade Roberts, and Azizi Johari appear in supporting roles.
Opening Night is a 1977 American psychological drama film written and directed by John Cassavetes, and starring Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell, Paul Stewart, Zohra Lampert, and Cassavetes. Its plot follows a stage actress who, after witnessing the accidental death of a fan, struggles through a nervous breakdown while she prepares for an upcoming Broadway premiere.
À Nos Amours is a 1983 French coming-of-age drama film directed by Maurice Pialat, who co-wrote the screenplay with Arlette Langmann. Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Pialat and Évelyne Ker, the story follows a 15-year-old girl, Suzanne (Bonnaire), as she experiences her sexual awakening and becomes promiscuous, but is unable to feel love. À Nos Amours won the César Award for Best Film in 1984.
A Child Is Waiting is a 1963 American drama film written by Abby Mann based on his 1957 Westinghouse Studio One teleplay of the same name. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by John Cassavetes. Burt Lancaster portrays the director of a state institution for intellectually disabled and emotionally disturbed children, and Judy Garland is a new teacher who challenges his methods.
Shinji Aoyama was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, composer, film critic, and novelist. He graduated from Rikkyo University. He won two awards at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for his film Eureka.
Zoe Rowlands Cassavetes is an American film director, screenwriter, and actress. She is the daughter of filmmaker John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands. She is best known for her 2007 film Broken English.
The Notebook is a 2004 American romantic drama film directed by Nick Cassavetes, from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and Jan Sardi, and based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams as a young couple who fall in love in the 1940s. Their story is read from a notebook in the present day by an elderly man, telling the tale to a fellow nursing home resident.
Benjamin Harwood Jr., better known as Bo Harwood, was an American sound mixer, sound editor, sound engineer, music supervisor, composer, and songwriter. Harwood's sound work gained attention in the 1970s after his work on films directed by John Cassavetes. In the 1990s and 2000s, Harwood worked primarily as a mixer for several television series, including Felicity and Six Feet Under.
John Cassavetes began his career in film in 1953 and ended it in 1986, between which times he was involved in every aspect of the film, television, and stage arts, including acting, directing, scoring, shooting, editing, producing, and marketing.
I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes, the Man and His Work is a 1989 documentary directed by Michael Ventura and starring John Cassavetes in his final film appearance.
Lady Rowlands was an American film actress. Most of her work came in the films of John Cassavetes, who was married to her daughter, actress Gena Rowlands.