Looking for Love Streams

John Cassavetes holding Gena Rowlands in loving embrace.

Paris, early December, 2008. The shop is crowded with balding men in trenchcoats squeezing past each other to flip through the next unlabeled box of DVDs as if they’re going to find what they’re looking for;outside, the rain falls, and indoors we’re dry and warm. After twenty minutes of looking, I don’t know how to find what I’m looking for – is the movie title in French? Is the box slim or thick? Will there be a picture on the cover with an actor I recognize? A while passes and I’ve searched through all the racks in the store, even gotten on my knees and turned my head sideways to look at the stacks underneath the tables. There’s no method of organization, no way to find anything; the clerks aren’t going to be any help, either. Does what I want exist? Am I searching for a unicorn disguised as a movie? Would my time be better spent eating a crepe or something typical, doing tourist bullshit rather than wasting my time in a secondhand movie store. Finally, I give up and go back outside. It’s still raining.

Love Streams is the final completed film that John Cassavetes, the father of independent cinema, would ever make. Cassavetes was a master of human film-making, talking about real shit that everyone doesn’t think but feels, but you can read about that in full detail anywhere else because I don’t understand his movies yet and wouldn’t claim to. I saw my first movie by him, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, in the summer of 2008 and didn’t understand the whole but liked the parts a lot. There’s lots of stuff to get but the most important thing about Cassavetes is understanding life, that little moments of behavior tics and random circumstance are just as important as narratives about exploding helicopters or superheroes, that film can capture a lot but most importantly the feeling of what it is to be alive. Every one of Cassavetes’ films I’ve seen grabs something deep, sticks its hand into the rib cage and squeezes the spirit in your chest so that you might feel a twinge of something, not packaged emotional conclusions brought on by Hollywood directors trying to get you to understand the world their way, but something.

Finding a copy of Love Streams, which was never released on DVD in America, which is only available Stateside in an edited & expensive VHS format, was important to me. The film is considered by some packs of critics to be his “magum opus,” his “swan song” if you will, because it was the last independent film he would make before dying of cirrhosis at the too-young age of 59. I think that’s kind of important, the final realized work of art from any artist or collective, because they’re trying to say everything they can before they go away. There’s a final message, a final theme, a final something, something to help you understand the career as a whole. If you knew you were dying, what would you want to say to the world? I wanted to get an idea of what Cassavetes’ final word was, not read a summary in a film theory book or read a review online. I wanted to see it for myself.

I couldn’t find a VHS copy at the alternative film store and I wasn’t going to pay a lot of money for an incomplete product, so I started looking outside America. It wasn’t available in England. It wasn’t available in most of Europe. After doing a little bit of research, basically just going to Wikipedia, I found that a DVD had been released in France, and was indeed available for purchase. It could be found on the French Amazon website for twenty euros, but shipping was going to be a lot of money. This would be a really short story if I had decided to navigate an unreadable website in order to buy the DVD, but that felt too impersonal. At the end of the summer when I was looking for this movie, I remembered I was going to be in London in the fall for a study abroad experience. I remembered that France is very close to England. I decided I would go to France.

To say that I went to another country just to buy a DVD would be wrong, but not entirely; I’d say it was about a third of the motivation. One third was to see a friend and the other was to have more than two decent meals in a row, but yes, when I got on the train to Paris in early December I was meaning to find and buy this movie. I knew it was available for purchase somewhere, but I didn’t know where I’d find it. Did they have Best Buys in France? Obviously not, I figured. Was there an equivalent? I had no idea.

I was in Paris and looking for movie shops; my friend had abandoned me for a few hours to go to class at the nearby university and I was killing time on the streets looking at all the stores that were about to close and trying to find an English-language bookstore when I started to come across stores. The experience was the same in every one: Unorganized stacks, a clerk who had never heard of the film, and crowded aisles as everyone was hunting for a new deal. Sometimes you really need that five euro copy of Half Baked, or whatever American comedy was piled up on top of the folding tables that filled a lot of these stores. I went to stores in the center of Paris, stores opposite of the Seine, and stores down dark alleys without finding even a broken case or an inkling of recognition when one store gave me a nibble: Multiple copies of Cassavetes’ Gloria were to be found. It wasn’t Love Streams, but it was a movie by the same man. It was a positive sign.

I didn’t spend three days just looking for this DVD, because I was in Paris. You can fill in the blanks there: A mix of drinking, eating, tourist bullshit, cat petting, getting fined on the bus, almost getting pick-pocketed, and getting told to fuck my mother. The typical Parisian experience. It was my second-to-last day and I was afraid I would be leaving Paris empty-handed, when lo and behold, do you know where I found it? It wasn’t in an alternative film store. It wasn’t in a bootleg DVD case. It wasn’t in the middle of a stack. It was found, listed in alphabetic order, in a Virgin Megastore. The rarest Cassavetes film, a film ranked 24th on EW’s List of the Most Cult Movies of All-Time, found brand-new in a corporately slick music emporium. A movie by a man who only chronicled the emotions people least expected to deal with while watching a movie in the place you would expect to find a movie. Well, huh.

I bought the DVD. It was fifteen euros, money I could have been spending on a nice meal or some memorabilia junk, but as I handed the bill to the clerk I could not contain the smile on my face. It felt good to have something I wanted; not something I could easily buy at the corner store, but something I had to want so much that I had to cross the ocean in order to find it, to rifle through half a dozen stores in search of something I wasn’t sure I could even find. I kept on checking my bag to make sure the DVD was still there, especially as I was getting ready to go back to London and later America.

I didn’t watch it right away. I didn’t even watch it for three months. Does that sound silly to obsess over finding something and then not use it as soon as possible? I wanted to wait to watch it with a friend of mine who is also a Cassavetes fan, because it didn’t seem fulfilling to watch by myself. A quest can be a singular thing, but watching a movie, if done in the right company, is almost always better as a group experience than it is a solo effort. I waited until this friend was back from her own study abroad trip to finally take the DVD out and play it, which we did last week.

The movie, well, I don’t understand all of it, obviously. I didn’t expect to. It’s about love, and loving those around you, and how you’re loved back. “Love is a stream,” says Sarah Lawson, played by Gena Rowlands in a typical crazy Cassavetes female role. “It’s continuous.” At one point, an estranged son asks his father if he can use his toothbrush. “Use your finger” is what he gets in return(Parenting 101, Cassavetes style). At one point, Lawson calls her recently-divorced-from husband and says, “I’m almost not crazy anymore.” He doesn’t have any sympathy. “I just don’t care” is his response.

There’s this moment towards the end when Robert Harmon, Lawson’s brother playedJohn Cassavetes (in real life, they were married), is trying to corral a number of farm animals, that Rowlands has purchased for him to love, back into his house during a torrential thunderstorm. Lawson has just stirred from a nervous breakdown in which she dreams about reuniting with her husband and her daughter, and stands at the doorway to tell this to her brother. He looks at her with the most determined look I’ve ever seen from an actor and says, “Look, I’m not kidding around. I do not want you to go to some guy who doesn’t love you. I love you and I want you to stay here and I want you to stay here forever. I’m taking care of the animals. I’m taking care of everything.” He pauses for a moment and stares at her, letting the weight of his words hang in the air, this ultimate proclamation of love. His voice is so pleading and so firm and so honest, a candle flickering in the darkness of her world. He wants her to stay, wants her to be happy and to try to make things work in this crazy house filled with animals, but it’s not going to happen. Love is not about what you want to happen, but love can’t stop no matter what happens. Love is continuous.

What about the things we love? Do we love them because we tell ourselves we do? Do we love because we expect something in return? Or is love something more basic, nothing that can be quantified with Valentine’s Day cards or flowers or well wishing but the sudden realization that someone or something means as much to you as you mean to yourself, that you want to see someone else be happy as you do yourself, that you want to survive in a world knowing that they are surviving as well? This quiet moment in the night or conversation is no big event because when we become aware of our love, we’ve been showing it for a long time. Love is a stream, Gena Rowlands said. Love doesn’t stop. Love doesn’t quit. You don’t stop loving something because it no longer loves you, and you don’t stop loving something because it doesn’t return your calls. You always love.

This is part of what Love Streams is about, and why Cassavetes’ films are so alluring to me. He realized that with characters, moving from point A to point B can’t just be contained in a two-hour movie. That character was somewhere before point A and will be somewhere after point B, and more could be learned from an unresolved conflict than a neatly-wrapped up story arc. Film, in its emulation of reality, can never reach total translation of life, but what it can do is represent the moments in which profound things, when people, are realized, the ups and downs of life. Cassavetes understood this. The movie understands this.

Love Streams ends with Harmon looking at the camera from inside his house, with the rain pouring like it did in Paris. He grabs his hat and waves it at the audience, as if to say goodbye. A few years later, he would be dead; in a sense, he was saying goodbye forever. This is brought up when talking about the film because it provides such a neat wrapping point for the man’s career, a poetic finale. But it’s not that simple. He really was saying goodbye to us. It really was his last moment. We rob actions of their power because of the meaning are able to process from them, but think of the underappreciated master giving us all of his love in filmic form and bidding us farewell, thanking us for coming along for the ride. Think of the sadness of saying goodbye for the last time. Think about doing something not just because you love someone or something, but because you can do nothing else. Think of love, and maybe try to see this movie.