I was just watching Minnie and Moskowitz, and the black and white picture above Minnie's bed of little ballerinas in the spotlight is IDENTICAL to one of the later "dream" sequences in Love Streams. Significance?
Let's see how many parallels we can draw between Love Streams and the rest.
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"Gimme a REAL baa-baa!"
Children.
Children in every Cassavetes movie, Husbands, Opening Night, Gloria, and this one, are not automatically adored by everyone else in the movie. They are initially kept at a distance, and then they are reluctantly put up with, until finally they are shown to be as real and vulnerable as the adults.
They are never cute, one-dimensional characters.
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Great point ! The ballerinas sequence also reminded me of Mabel's love for Swan Lake in A Woman Under the Influence. Maybe Gena was a ballet fan ?
And also, John Cassavetes, in a scene with his character's son, says a similar speech than in the beginning of Opening Night's play, when talking about old people. He says how much he loves old people, "because they know"
" You ain't running this place, Bert, WILLIAMS is!" Sgt Harris
More than a culmination of Cassavetes’s obsessions, Love Streams—based on a play by Ted Allan that Cassavetes staged, in somewhat different form, in Los Angeles in 1981—is a palimpsest through which many of his other movies are visible. Sarah and Jack suggest older, life-bruised versions of the agitated characters Rowlands and Cassel played in the opposites-attract comedy Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). The central relationship in Love Streams—between Sarah, a woman reeling from the rejection of her husband and daughter, and her brother, Robert Harmon (Cassavetes), a dissolute novelist who has organized his life to avoid the possibility of a lasting human relationship—harkens back to the sibling ties in Shadows (1959). Their reunion takes place in Robert’s big Hollywood Hills house, which was also the married Rowlands and Cassavetes’s real-life home, a vividly lived-in location for several other Cassavetes films, most notably Faces (1968). In a body of work in which gender roles always matter, Sarah is, in more ways than one, the ultimate Cassavetes woman, and Robert the ultimate Cassavetes man. Sarah, an emotional live wire, is kin to Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night (1977), women who struggle valiantly with their capacity and need for love, with “how to love” and “where to put it.” A boozy charmer in a rumpled tux, with a knack for turning all interactions into transactions, Robert is a more cultured brother to the suave strip-club owner Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), or an alternate-world variant of the suburbanites in Husbands (1970), more successful and even more hollow.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3261-love-streams-a-fitful-flow