Tribeca 2017: Thirst Street
Monday, May 1, 2017 at 10:00AM
JA in Anjelica Huston, Lindsay Burdge, Thirst Street, Tribeca

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...

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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