With his latest feature, Thirst Street, Nathan Silver yet again proves he is one of the best American contemporary filmmaker around, sculpting a strange yet affecting portrait of longing, desire, and desperation in which the potential for danger and violence is beautifully juxtaposed with that of a sympathetic portrait of one woman desperate to find connection again after the suicide of her husband. Silver's films are considered outre, and rightfully so, yet they detail complex emotions with searing authenticity through the filmmaker's unique formalism, doing so in a way that always places the emotional core front and center. The main protagonist of this story, Gina, played masterfully by Lindsay Burdge, is a character who walks a fine line between sympathetic and deranged, an individual who becomes increasingly obsessed with a Parisian bartender, after she misinterprets a one-night stand as something more. She is an individual who many or not be slowly unraveling, walking right along that edge between sympathetic and dangerous, and Lindsay Burdge deserves many accolades for a performance that manages to capture both. A Neon-soaked aesthetic reminiscent of Italian giallo suggests a macabre conclusion, but this is just a subversion by the filmmaking, whom suggests an underlying sense of menace that never comes in the scope of the narrative. Silver's aesthetic teases danger, but it's just a device to express the murky nature of complex emotions, as Thirst Street showcases the fine-line which can exist between emotional fragility, desperation, and obsessions. Perhaps Nate Silver's most accessible film to-date, Thirst Street feels like a slow-motion trainwreck in cinematic form, a film which never divulges into thriller territory even though it suggests it will, subverting expectations while painting a vivid tapestry of fragility, and the complex relationships between to desire, longing, and desperation.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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