High Tide – BFI Flare 2025

Writer and Director: Marco Calvani

Provincetown is always best at the end of the season. Most of the tourists have gone, and you have the miles of sandy beaches and the causeway cutting through the breakwater almost to yourself. The expanses of sky and sea sometimes make you feel like you’re the last person on Earth. Off-season can be an exhilarating form of solitariness, but then when night falls, company can be sought in the downtown gay bars. PTown is the perfect setting for Marco Calvani’s film about loneliness and social seclusion.

Lourenço makes his money from being a houseboy, that most Provincetown of professions. He cleans rentals in the morning in return for cash in hand. He’s Brazilian and only on a tourist visa, which is about to expire at the end of the month. He never planned on this occupation but when his American boyfriend Joe dumped him, he had little choice but to stay and eke out a living as best he can.

Going back to Brazil isn’t an option. He’s from a small religious town, and his mother doesn’t know he’s gay. The Massachusetts resort is a refuge, has been since the 1980s when, as his landlord (a wise Bill Irwin) discloses it became the place where many gay men came to heal or to die. Poet Mark Doty has explored these themes in his collections such as Atlantis, elegies for his lover Wally, who died from AIDS, and for Provincetown itself.

However, Lourenço is struggling to heal, still trying to contact Joe, who never answers his calls. His mother thinks he’s studying at Havard, and he’s yet to tell her the truth. But after work one afternoon he meets handsome Maurice, a nurse from New York City, enjoying a short vacation with his exuberant friends.

As a Black man, Maurice also feels like an outsider in America. He tells Lourenço one night at the beach that the thing he’s most scared of is the police; to be a Black man in the States is always dangerous. The two men bond over this sense of alienation and fear. They begin a relationship.

But while Lourenço (played by Calvani’s husband Marco Pigossi) is a sharply drawn character, Maurice (James Bland) is, in contrast, rather flat. Despite his problems with being American, Maurice seems too uncomplicated, and the parallels between his experience and Lorenço’s are overly pat. We simply don’t know enough of Maurice to see him as some kind of saviour for Lourenço.

Their holiday romance forms the backbone of the story, sometimes edging into romcom territory, but despite only being shot in 17 days, Calvani’s approach is often too leisurely, with the result that the film seems overlong. Still, he is not afraid to show the less savoury aspects of gay life; sexual assault, drugs, predatory queens. These seem even more unpleasant when played out against cerulean skies and endless seas.

While Pigossi is excellent as the vulnerable and broken Lourenço, it is Marisa Tomei who almost steals the film with her portrayal of the ex-wife of his employer. A little scatty but good-hearted, her artist offers a clear-headed stance in this story of hurt, loss and exile.

High Tide is screening at BFI Flare 2025 from 19-30 March.