HIGH TIDE
By Chuck Wilson
In High Tide, the superb debut feature written and directed by Marco Calvani, a 30-something undocumented Brazilian immigrant named Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) finds himself abandoned in Provincetown, Massachusetts, by the boyfriend he followed to America. There are worse things, most will say, especially when they see the splendid vine-covered cottage Lourenço is renting from his boyfriend’s longtime friend Scott (Bill Irwin). With his tourist visa soon to expire, Lourenço, who was an accountant in Brazil, is working as a housecleaner to make ends meet, and hoping against hope he’ll find a way to stay for good. He’s fallen in love with the beach, its endless blue sky, and the lighthearted spirit of those he meets. Provincetown, he declares, is “a beautiful bubble.”
Handsome as all get out, but seemingly only half aware of it, Lourenço is amusingly dumbstruck when Maurice (James Bland), a tall, bearded, equally handsome nurse from Flushing, New York, strikes up a conversation on the beach. A man overly accustomed to solitude, Lourenço begs off Maurice’s late-night beach party invite. But later, alone in his bed beneath the postcard of Jesus he promised his mother he’d put up, he reconsiders. Calvani, who is also a seasoned playwright, and cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez shoot Lourenço’s moment of wide-awake indecision from outside the cottage, through the window, an elegant bit of framing that signals a director with an eye for texture and nuance. Much later, the filmmaker will look again through that window, only this time Lourenço won’t be alone in bed; he’ll be entwined with another.
At the beach party, Lourenço tells Maurice that his boyfriend moved on in his travels, leaving him behind. “Kind of an ex-boyfriend,” Maurice observes. As they sit and talk, bathed in moonlight, Calvani shifts to almost alarmingly tight close-ups of both men, an acting challenge his gifted leads can withstand. The two men talk about God and Jesus and his enviably long hair. Lourenço asks Maurice what he’s most afraid of. Maurice, who is Black, says, “The police.”
Lourenço admires Maurice’s ability to fully engage with the world, and Maurice will keep Lourenço honest about his day-to-day reality as one of the few Black men on the island. Calvani’s screenplay presents Maurice with more than one opportunity to explore those challenges, including a love scene during which Lourenço responds to Maurice’s sexual needs with a racially charged preconception. Maurice sticks up for himself, but Bland’s portrayal suggests that an even deeper response in Maurice is something akin to grief — as if he’s thinking, Yes, even here, with this lovely man, this is how the world continues to be.
In the homestretch, Calvini presses a bit too hard in his quest to find active turns of plot, but he’s also not one for high melodrama. He’s helped by Irwin, who keeps undercutting our expectations of who Scott, the landlord, really is, even when the script calls for him to be a bigot or a lonely old fool. Irwin is matched by Marisa Tomei, who’s marvelous as Miriam, a painter for whom Lourenço is doing handyman work. Miriam knows from melodrama. Once, she fell in love in an unexpected way, and to pursue that love had to break the heart of another. She has no regrets. Being emotionally daring brought color into her canvases and into her life, a thing she wishes for Lourenço, whose tendency toward melancholy she can’t help but notice.
Why does Lourenço keep staring off into the distance, even when he’s just had passionate sex with a wonderful new man? To his credit, Calvani isn’t interested in listing woes — we’re meant to take Lourenço as we see him, and as he presents himself. Making his American film debut, Pigossi gives us a gay man who’s only half out of the closet, who’s only just now getting the chance to know himself, and who’s having to run — sometimes literally — to catch up to the man he’s becoming.
Lourenço is not a big talker, but his face ripples with surprise when he learns something new about the world, and about himself. On the beach, Maurice and his friends go skinny-dipping, which catches Lourenço, still wearing his swimsuit, completely off guard. He looks stricken, and then delighted when he realizes that this freedom extends to him, too. A night or two later, in the cottage bedroom, when Maurice leans down to kiss him, Lourenço looks back at him with a kind of wonder, as if he’s never before been looked at so directly by a man. The next morning he’ll serve Maurice coffee in bed with a pleasure that makes the moment new again. In High Tide, self-discovery and reinvention arrive in the gentlest of gestures.