“Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” Director John Cassavetes’s final masterpiece (he’d be diagnosed with fatal cirrhosis of the liver during production) takes its title from these lines, a nakedly romantic sentiment that sounds like a curse when spoken during divorce proceedings by the mentally unstable Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’s real-life partner). Over the course of the film’s bruising, hysterical 141 minutes, Sarah and her brother Robert, a celebrity writer played with louche charm by Cassavetes himself, will try to rein in their considerable dysfunctions for just long enough to find an outlet for the surplus of love that’s slowly eating away at both of them. For Robert, this means pursuing a series of younger paramours and making a disastrous attempt to connect with his long-estranged son. Sarah, meanwhile, rebounds from the dissolution of her marriage with an ill-conceived European vacation and trips out to the bowling alley “looking for the sex.” More than twenty years after Shadows marked him as the standard-bearer for American independent film, Cassavetes found an unlikely backer in The Cannon Group, beloved purveyors of Death Wish sequels and Chuck Norris vehicles whose mulish pursuit of prestige would also lead them to financing films by Raúl Ruiz, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Luc Godard. While in the past Cassavetes would be knee-capped working with other people’s money, Love Streams wound up being the director’s most uncompromising film, an unruly amalgam of musical numbers, searing family drama, slapstick comedy, and surrealist interludes that’s like nothing else in American cinema.

35mm from Park Circus

Preceded by: Cassavetes trailer reel