Marco Calvani | High Tide / 2024

goodbye joe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco Calvani (screenwriter and director) High Tide / 2024

 

High Tide is one of the best feature films I have watched in a long while, with a rather complex plot and a work filled with pain and suffering for its young hero, the Brazilian émigré who has settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gayest towns in the US, but also one with beautiful outlying beaches and back beaches created by the high tides.

    Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) has settled there with a US visitor’s visa with his lover Joe, who we never see and, and as the film progresses, we realize has long ago returned to Brazil. Yet Lourenço is still convinced he might return and retrieve their deep relationship without any apparent evidence.

      Joe was evidently a friend also of the aging Provincetown resident Scott (Bill Irwin), a friendly and slightly nosy elderly man whose former lover of years before died of AIDS. He secretly keeps in touch with Joe, but has now rented out his guest house to Lourenço who is not only facing the expiration of his visitor’s visa, but the loss of his former lover. Unable to find any regular employment, particularly under simply a visitor’s visa, he has taken a part-time job with the quite obnoxious Bob (Sean Mahon) who hires him out day-to-day to clean the houses of wealthy Provincetown residents, and whose requirements are a strict cleaning of every surface, which Lourenço seems to have perfected. But it is a mean and often abusive job, for which Bob sometimes pays him but at other times claims to have forgotten his checkbook.

     We perceive quite early on that things are not going well for Lourenço, who early in the film gives us a preview of the most dramatic and tense moment of the film, which we don’t, at first, perceive as a representation of our “heroes” almost complete breakdown.

      Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in 2024 on the Roger Ebert site, nicely summarizes the scene and events soon after:

      “The movie begins with a portent-charged scene that turns out to be a flash-forward: Lourenço goes to the beach, strips off all his clothes, swims out into the ocean, and floats in the water. It’s a perfect example of a symbolic image that sums up the whole movie without explaining itself: this is a man whose life and possibilities are suspended, floating, unmoored. The young people who visit Provincetown and interact with Lourenço are similarly unmoored, at least temporarily, from their regular lives. The group includes Mya Taylor (of Sean Baker’s film “Tangerine”) as Crystal, sort of the druggy den mother of the group, and Maurice (James Bland), a tall, broad-shouldered dreamboat whose fish-out-of-water experience as a gay Black man in a mostly white enclave glancingly mirror’s Lourenço’s feelings of aloneness. They’re drawn together and become briefly entangled; it’s a powerful physical attraction that might turn into something more were it not for both men’s anxieties. Their sex is steamy and elegantly photographed but also brief and somewhat elliptical, striving for the poetic and nearly succeeding, with many closeups of strong hands touching bare skin.”

     But even before Lourenço meets Maurice, we see him going home with an older man, who has no qualms about having anal sex with him without a condom. It is an ugly scene, typical of young men willing to go with people they casually meet at bars, but in this case, at lease, a release for the lonely and isolated Lourenço. Afraid to go to a doctor to have himself checked, since it might further jeopardize his visiting status, he begins taking, through a friend, PrEp (pre-exposure prophylaxis), not a certain preventative, but certainly helpful in preventing HIV exposure.

Maurice, however, changes everything as the two share simply a beautiful masturbatory experience that makes it quite clear, that Maurice is not only sensitive to his new lover’s situation but is a sensitive lover as well.

      Maurice, who warns his new lover about swimming in the ocean waters due to sharks, shares with him his secret back waters that come with the ocean’s “high tides.” Together they swim in the special place, growing even closer together as friends.

      Yet, at dinner, when Lourenço shares his enthusiasm for having come to the US from a close-minded small Brazilian town, Maurice himself explains that he, however, feels at odds in the Trump world of the US, and is planning soon to move to Angola to use his doctoring skills in helping others where he feels he might be much more at home. Look around the room, he advises Lourenço, do you see any others like me, a black man; there is hardly anyone in this town with whom I can closely identify. The US, for him, is clearly not the innocent paradise that Lourenço might imagine it to be.

      Meanwhile, Scott, plans a dinner later in the week with a lawyer, who he claims might have some solutions for Lourenço’s visa problems

      Bob hires him to help paint his ex-wife’s house, but almost once they begin the painting, Bob bows out, not finishing the job in one day, as he has promised his wife Miriam (Marisa Tomei). They plan to return the next day to put on the second coat, but almost the moment he arrives, Bob gets in the truck and pulls away, explaining he has other business, leaving the newbie assistant to finish the paint job.

      But in the process, Lourenço meets Miriam who explains that Bob’s problem is that she realized she was a lesbian, explaining to him that “It’s inevitable you might break someone’s heart on the way to opening your own.”

     Lourenço fully appreciates her paintings, which Bob describes as finger-painting, and the two bond. When Bob returns, he almost immediately leaves again with his truck, leaving his assistant high and dry, with Miriam appreciatively driving him home.

    Maurice invites Lourenço to a bar party for his last night in town, and earlier in the evening he shares dinner with Scott and his lawyer friend Todd (Bryan Batt), who turns out to be a bigoted blowhard, who diminishes Lourenço’s experience and certificate as an accountant, arguing that surely that is nothing special enough for the US government to want to grant him a further stay, and he continues on to demean the very ideal of the LGBTQIAP+ nomenclature, and a possible museum being created in Provincetown about which Scott is pleased. Seitz captures the scene quite nicely:

“There’s a lot going on in here at the level of plot and scene-setting/background (and some gentle satire as well, with the older men discussing what all the letters mean in Provincetown’s work-in-progress “LGBTQIAP+ Museum”; Todd particularly dislikes the “Q”). But there’s also a subtle lament that such a person might decide Lourenço’s fate, and astute analysis of anthropologically exact types of people who would never think of themselves as types. Pigossi’s face draws everything together, lending weary realism to the scene’s journalistic tendencies.”

     Afterwards, Lourenço escapes to the bar party with Maurice. He is offered drugs, but refuses; but only a few moments into the evening, an old friend reports to him what he has not heard, that Joe now plans to marry his high school sweetheart back in Brazil, which means, clearly that also Scott has known of his plans without reporting them to Lourenço. Along with Maurice’s departure the next day, it is like a three-punch knock out for the Brazilian, who now realizes not only is his stay in the US in true jeopardy, but that he has probably lost his job connections with Bob, but has now totally lost his lover who cannot be honest enough to admit to his homosexuality. And Maurice, the only person with whom his has truly connected with in Provincetown, is now about the leave him as well. It’s more than enough to make any grown man break down into full despair, although Lourenço tries to resolve the situation by finally accepting the drugs and falling into a kind of narcissistic-like trance, dancing alone, as even Maurice leaves him to himself.

      Lourenço returns home to angrily confront Scott for keeping the truth from him, describing him as a loser as well, living in the past. Although Maurice arrives to apologize for his abandonment of the night, he is on his way to the ferry that will eventually take him to Angola.

     At the last moment, the pained Lourenço hurries after him, but arrives when the ferry has already departed, the old bicycle he has been riding around again breaking its chain.

      It is at that moment when, in the chronology of the film, he strips and dares the ocean waves in true despair.

      The Brazilian boy returns home to beg for Scott’s forgiveness, and soon after is seen working with Miriam, helping her with the computer. Perhaps she has even hired him on for a real job that might help with his visa. The film doesn’t answer the profound dilemmas it has set up. But in the last scenes we see Lourenço with a camera attempting to show his bothersome mother the beauty of the world he has discovered in America. He pauses before explaining that he has been lying to her, and that he will not be coming back home. This is no coming out film, but a film of our hero’s true embracement of his new life, whatever that might bring.

     Pigossi is a natural on film—we literally can’t keep our eyes off him, nor does director Calvani’s camera let us, despite the fact he is not a typical beauty. But Calvani’s premier feature, despite it flaws, is truly a film to think about, representing the painful journey of so many who have come to our shores perhaps deluded, but have been able to make new lives here nonetheless with grace, beauty, and major contributions to our confused culture. Too bad we lose the Maurice’s in the process.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).