"Begun when Cassavetes was already quite ill, (and) richly self-reflective, LoveStreams allows Cassavetes to revisit scenes, characters, and events from his previous works and tomeditate on the meaning of a life lived in art" (Raymond Carney). Cassavetes portrays a disillusionedwriter, Robert Harmon, Gena Rowlands his sister Sarah in this film that is about the blows and buttressesof family in a more complicated way than any of Cassavetes' earlier works. Based on a play by Cassavetes'close friend Ted Allan (author of Lies My Father Told Me), who also co-wrote the script, the film works thebrother-sister as one Janus-faced character: Robert, who runs away from any children he may havefathered in order to continue being the child himself, and Sarah, perpetually maternal and insistently happy,who believes that everyone needs something-anything-to love. (To wit: her arrival at Robert's home with ataxi full of pets.) Like Sarah, Cassavetes always seems to have said you can't have too much love; but boththese lives are dead-ending-Robert's in dissipation and Sarah's in divorce-precisely from too much loving.In other words the male breakdowns in Husbands and Faces and the female ones in A Woman Under theInfluence and Opening Night converge in Love Streams. But for Cassavetes the crack-ups are the mostfruitful moments of life. They can teach us how to love, rather than faking it. It was Gloria who snapped ather little charge, "Just don't be phoney; I hate that." Now it is Sarah who gaily telephones her husband,"Jack? I'm almost not crazy now."