Indefatigable Jason Adams with another review from Tribeca!
For anyone who's ever felt like the most pathetic poke in the cabbage patch I give you Thirst Street, a hyper-fevered ode to our most self-destructive urges. Narrated by Anjelica Huston!
You think you're bad, refreshing your oblivious self-assigned amour's Facebook feed ten times a day? Wait til you catch a load of Gina (played by a madly committed Lindsay Burdge), the flight attendant fleeing her barely-cold ex's corpse to stalk a one-night stand with all the force of a category four...
Gina sweeps through Paris on a wing and a prayer - a prayer born of an alluringly misshapen (every body is misshapen in this place) psychic's tarot reading telling her she'll find new and lasting infatuation with a tall dark stranger right quick. Only problem is the reading was bribed by Gina's meaning-well friends, and from that unknown-to-her deception spirals a crazy-pants quest to the last vestiges of ruined self-respect.
You can't take a movie like Thirst Street at face value because Gina's an impossible person - a fun-house mirror's version of all our worst impulses. Thankfully writer-director Nathan Silver is smart enough to stage it like a fever dream - lighting by Bava, behavior by Brecht. I thought most of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends, in which our willfully immolating main character douses himself in love's sweet kerosene and hands a bunch of assholes a match - Gina finds crazy so delicious she can't quit. Who hasn't been there...