“High Tide” will put you on the edge of your seat. Set in the streets and beaches of Provincetown, the writer-director Marco Calvani creates an emotional narrative of an undocumented gay Brazilian, Lourenço. With an uncertain future creeping close, he figures his time in town is almost due, and is counting the hours left. A completely different subculture that has moneyed gay or lesbian residents and young queer tourists renting property during summer is captured in the movie, as well as its storytelling. The sentiments blend perfectly with Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail” and Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” This sensation of melancholy is beautifully captured in the movie, where one can have the feeling of transformatively experiencing a new place, but looking at the calendar and dreading when it all comes to an end. The important feeling of having something profound happen to you is evident, but it comes with not knowing what matters or how it will be handled.
At the beginning of the movie, there is a scene that is filled with mystery, here Lourenço is at a beach. He takes off everything he is wearing and swims into the ocean. This is a man without ties, floating without a purpose. The youth that visit Provincetown, along with Lourenço, experience life without any boundaries, at least for a little while. Mya Taylor, from Sean Baker’s ‘Tangerine’, stars as Crystal and functions as a drug-addled den mother to the group. James Bland portrays Maurice, as a strong, tall, broad-shouldered man. His experience as a gay black man in an almost entirely white community is disorienting and does indeed parallel Lourenço’s situation of feeling extremely isolated. All of them start off slightly overly attracted to one another, but things don’t progress due to the anxiety both parties experience. Their sex, or rather the physical attraction is well captured on camera, but it is only momentary. The sex is intense, but brief, erotic yet distorted, striving for the poetic and almost managing to achieve it, with an abundance of closeups of strong hands touching bare skin.
The film has a soothing calmness to it, making everything seem effortless, including the acting. It was shot by Oscar Ignacio Jiménez and he has managed to take stills of the ocean that go along nicely with what is going on in the scene. Unlike many other films, Jiménez does not accentuate the ocean’s grandeur to the point where it becomes a distraction. Everything goes together nicely. Their bond is genuine and emotionally themed, even if the obligatory breakup scene in the third act is overly dramatic and unnatural. Still, it was done remarkably. Not only can you tell that Maurice is in pain, but he has also amplified the agony and set himself on auto-pilot. A good portion of how Maurice interacts with others is culturally void, making it seem weird and awkward. Although, “Of course when you’re about to leave, you finally find a reason to stay,” is an interesting one-liner.
It is noteworthy that there are several other outstanding performances, and the picture does a wonderful job of giving you just enough of the secondary figures to gauge them in your mind the moment Lourenço steps away from them. Bill Irwin is poignant as the protagonist’s landlord, Steve, who is an elderly man who came to Provincetown at the height of the AIDS epidemic to ‘heal or die,’ and after losing his partner, rents the guesthouse to people like Lourenço who clean vacation rentals and do random odd jobs for summers. Seán Mahon as Bob, one of Lourenço’s bosses, is Cooper’s aggravatingly furious and frighteningly compelling. Bob is irascible in part because his ex-wife, local artist Miriam (Marisa Tomei), married a woman and left him. Miriam gets Lourenço for the reason that she is ready to turn her life inside out and is not in the right place.
“It can’t be helped that you will hurt others while attempting to heal yourself.” Then he adds, “But it’s always worth the effort.” (In the other film, ‘Brothers’, Tomas Tomei seeks to portray a woman developing a crush on a long-distance incarcerated robber. Tomei has amazed us all in two different releases this week. She is indeed a master of her craft and both parts are equally convincing. Someone needs to write a new lead for this woman.)
For instance, Pigossi is a film celebrity who knows how to act in front of a camera, having been one since birth. That means he is extremely sensitive to people’s feelings. He is sure that everything will be communicated if he completely becomes his character. He does not believe he should be helping the scene which means he should try out more vigorous activities.
There are situations in which he cleverly allows himself to be overwhelmed and enveloped by others who possess more glaringly vivid traits in a setting, many of whom, one would reasonably argue, are nowhere close to being as amusingly charming as they believe to be and are actually overdoing it in trying to portray “characters”. This is not intended to be a slight on the actors, who are remarkable, but a compliment on the writing. In such scenes, the person watching is always pulled back to Lourenço with his stunning yet haunted expression on his face as he attempts to organize jumbled and often disturbing emotions and fails, in front of the audience, to cover the tension.
A zoom shot that captures Lourenço sitting silently at the table dinner is one of the more powerful shots of the film. For instance, Steve’s guest Todd, a lawyer with a penchant for too much sycophancy, has been invited in the hopes that he will resolve the hero’s immigration problems and allow him to stay in the States. In a way, there is quite a bit happening here in terms of the logic of the plot and background of the scene(s) (and gentle satire too, as the elderly are trying to figure out what all the letters in Provincetown’s unfinished “LGBTQIAP+ Museum” mean; Todd seems to especially hate the “Q”). There is also a deeper concern about the possible variation of this theme; the astute anthropological oil paint rendering of the extreme, anthropologically precise types of people these older men are who would not for a second consider themselves types. Pigossi’s grasp of her character clearly unifies everything for the scene, making the scene’s surreal journalistic aspects realistically tired.
For all its good, “High Tide” may still be too meandering, and there are times when it is more of a set of anecdotes rather than an adequately complete work: a picaresque novel with a stationary plot. But this coarse feeling is not unusual in a debut feature as this work is primarily a statement of the filmmaker’s vision and motifs. It is a narrative bold enough to work because of the voice, and here, it is evident that there is their voice a lot stronger than the rest.
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