Alone and depressed after the suicide of her lover, American flight attendant Gina (Lindsay Burdge, A TEACHER) travels to Paris and hooks up with nightclub bartender Jerome (Damien Bonnard, STAYING VERTICAL) on her layover. But as Gina falls deeper into lust and opts to stay in France, this harmless rendezvous quickly turns into unrequited amour fou.
There's not much in the way of bruising insight into the makeup of a deteriorating personality, but for a compact spin through well-trod fields of lustful, sad-mad blindness, "Thirst Street" has its share of disreputably perverse pleasures.
Visually arresting with vibrant, expressive colors and a surreal atmosphere, Thirst Street resembles those French Emmanuelle skin flicks you weren't supposed to watch.
Few filmmakers are capable of imagining anything worse than supernatural horror or overly conventional heartbreak and Silver ends up creating something in between those worlds.
The result is a slow-motion car crash that you intimately experience from both in and outside the car. There's just enough distance to allow for wisdom but not enough so as not to feel the impact.
Thirst Street is a corrective to the scores of movies - American and otherwise - that portray unrequited romantic obsession as something other than what it really is: a slippery slope that's all but guaranteed to end with someone getting hurt.
Somehow, her acting combines with cinematography straight from an artsy 1970s porno and a soundtrack of woozy love songs to create an expressionist portrait of overwhelming loneliness.
So no, it's not a sly, dark, romantic deadpan comedy after all. It's dark all right - but it looks more like a train than a light at the end of the tunnel.
