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.”
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.”
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).
