Saw Love Streams (1984), a film I started off hating but which grew on me as it went on. It revolves around a brother/sister duo, Robert and Sarah, who both have complex relationships to love and sex. Robert is a creep who buys a whole house-full of prostitutes for a weekend. He drunkenly steals a lounge singer's car and flirts with the singer's mother. He's a hideous drunk from the depths of the 70s. Sarah meanwhile is a woman with a big heart who is pathetically obsessed with her ex-husband and daughter who she seems to have smothered with affection and neediness and who she is lost without.
The film opens with Robert boozing and whoring and working his shaggy charms on ladies, and I thought this was going to be a another one of those films that lionizes this pickup-artist, celebrating him with faint condemnation, ala The Wolf of Wall Street or Scarface. The film takes a turn however, showing Robert abandoning a newly discovered biological son to go whoring and stumbling down hotel hallways, stumbling into walls. He's an alcoholic and probably a sexaholic as well.
Similarly, Sarah is played by Gena Rowlands, at first appearing to be a somewhat controlling woman who is hurt by a messy divorce but ultimately descending into a reprise of her character in A Woman Under the Influence. She relies upon all of the men in her life, including taxi drivers and bellhops, to take care of her, using their squashy sensibility to balance her obsessions and manias.
The film is fascinatingly strange. It starts out as a standard 70s lionization of independence and excess but contains wild stylistic choices and plot points. It feels like a satire that was taken seriously. There's lines that are goofy one their faces but which are delivered with great seriousness, brittle and sincere. I wouldn't recommend the film as a crowd pleaser; it's very complex and strange. I enjoyed the film for its strangeness however, for what it made me think. There's a scene where a pit bull turns into a nude man. Seeing this, Robert erupts into gales of laughter, shouting "who the fuck are you?" and that's amazing and strange and delightful.
No comments:
Post a Comment