Recencies van critici

Overblown madness results in hysterical fits of laughter and demonstrative physicality, coupled with the film's piecemeal explication and the characters' frequent recklessness. As Cassavetes rightfully acknowledges, Love Streams is "a very crazy film.

That vulnerability haunts me and haunts my experience of watching Love Streams. Far from a bad thing, it just becomes difficult to parse through. The impossible truth of the performances in Cassavetes' work feels like a confrontation of the contradictions and fears that we try to hide from ourselves. The pain of watching his movies lies in the familiarity of the characters' emotional chaos and how desperately liberated they are onscreen.

If love is, as Cassavetes claimed, the act of "not knowing", then Love Streams is the purest manifestation of love in cinema. It's a search with nothing found, an act of loving, trying to love, of not knowing, but living, struggling.

The film is more an anthology of stories that bleed into each other than a linear narrative: The subject is the Inner Life, but with its breathtakingly cavalier shock cuts and elisions, the dominant sensation is of zigzag movement where the viewer is being tugged forward, sideways, and backwards at more or less the same time... Love Streams pours out like a hemorrhage, but a comic, operating-theater-of-the-absurd one.

Love Streams drops hints throughout about Cassavetes's illness, from his appearance to that fond wave goodbye that closes the film, but it may be the equilibrium bestowed upon Robert and Sarah that best suggests a benediction. Hopeful, open-ended conclusions are common in Cassavetes's films, but this film gives the most powerful impression that its characters have been markedly improved by their experience.

For Cassavetes, plot-filled movies give very little joy. A plotless film, on the other hand, is discernibly bursting with effort, strained and unfinished to free the characters from sentimental closure... Briefly it feels like Cassavetes is directing not just his film, but the end of his life, and also us, the audience. It's our goodbye to him. He's waiting for us, holding those beats.

Considering how stubborn and single-minded he could be, Cassavetes was a remarkably unorthodox filmmaker. Love Streams—which is both his most rigidly constructed work, and his most unpredictable—is a testament to this. It neither follows rules nor invents new ones...

So many of Cassavetes's other films are domestic disaster movies; the mood in Love Streams is postapocalyptic... The characters in Love Streams have lived through their share of crises and will likely live through more. The open ending bears out Sarah's philosophy. As Robert exits the frame, the song on the jukebox goes: "I didn't know what to do / So I'll leave it up to you"—a fitting farewell from a romantic who knew that on the subject of love there are no last words.

Cassavetes was gravely ill (with cirrhosis) at the time, and "Love Streams" is both a self-revealing look at a liberally alcoholized way of life and a self-conscious farewell to life itself... few directors have filmed as self-consciously and scathingly as Cassavetes did in "Love Streams." The movie is a mighty, intimate, kaleidoscopically subjective, bravely self-searching summation of a career, an era, and a life.

LOVE STREAMS is both [Cassavetes'] most fully realized [film] in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection and his most conventional in cinematic style... As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding love and marriage.

The biggest breakthroughs in Love Streams are formal, not emotional. Working off a steady narrative foundation, adapted from a play by Ted Allan, Cassavettes takes a much more controlled approach to presenting all this disorder, eschewing the usual practice of gritty handheld shots for composed, controlled ones that ground the madness within neater frames.

It's a rich, inviting work, full of beauty and vitality. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that Love Streams is the kind of film which can effectively change you, or that it's emotional impact is…well, it's unforgettable.