A jumbled and personal play about a queer migrant lost at sea, Marco Calvani’s “High Tide” features an amazing lead performance that keeps the film afloat even when it is weakest. It is knitted together by gentle moments: They follow Brazilian émigré Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) as he waits for his American lover to return in Provincetown Massachusetts’ gay promised land while his visa runs out. As kindness and cruelty pull at Lourenço from either side, Pigossi gives a stunning performance that practically heat welds the film’s disparate parts together, making it feel whole despite its flawed construction.
From the beginning of “High Tide,” Calvani makes sure to grab your attention with the quiet waves crashing against the shore and the stark image of Lourenço stripping off his clothes and lunging towards the ocean in an emotional crisis. This scene returns later in the film with more narrative context, but dangling it before you like this calls to mind undocumented migrants desperately taking to water.
Lourenço is not exactly a refugee, nor is he “undocumented” in any literal sense (though he is referred to using these terms multiple times). His tourist visa is simply set to expire soon, and the path toward staying in the U.S. legally is winding and filled with mile-high hurdles, although he does have a specialized accounting degree. So while waiting for Joe we are initially left uncertain about what actually happened between him and his boyfriend he takes under-the-table odd jobs cleaning and painting rich people’s summer homes, while living in Joe’s friend Scott’s tiny guest house; Scott (Bill Irwin) himself resides on top of Lourenço during this period as well.
As he waits for Joe eventually meets Maurice (James Bland), an attractive soft-spoken Black doctor from Queens on his way to a residency program in Angola. In his neverending parade of passing figures, though, Maurice provides Lourenço with enough of a spark to begin reevaluating his seemingly dire circumstances or rather, seeing them in a new light. Their dynamic is sweet if often overwrought in its writing, especially when Calvani tries to fold malformed critiques of white queerness into his purview.
These words that Pigossi and Bland are made to speak whether memories of racial animus or confessions of desire echo the kinds of lines one might find in an amateur high school stage production. But they’re performed with sincerity and innocence at every turn. Taking these largely function-first lines and imbuing them with longing is something Pigossi is particularly good at; he carries a deep uncertainty behind his eyes but also a soulfulness, which he alchemizes into a performance that is both beautiful and devastating (even if the movie around him often veers toward the trite or predictable).
Executive producer Marisa Tomei and “Tangerine” star Mya Taylor show up in minor supporting roles that allow both women despite their brevity onscreen to provide meaningful, energetic contrast to Pigossi’s reserve. But ultimately what lets “High Tide” work against itself is its freeing sense of vulnerability: thanks to cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, the film frequently enters long stretches of tight close-ups on locked eyes or smiling mouths or naked stretch marks or feet wrapped around lovers’ waists that create a hypnotic cinematic intimacy all their own.
Almost none of the film’s wide-ranging social themes find themselves aestheticized or dramatized with particular accuracy, past the bewildering uncertainty of Lourenço’s visa mess. But Pigossi seizes upon this notion of impermanence and spins it into a kind of instability of sand shifting under one’s feet so skillfully that he bends the movie around himself, making it seem unpredictable even as we recognize onscreen romantic beats and gestures near their ends. It is a performance at once radiant and sincere that keeps “High Tide” not only engaging but also occasionally joyful.
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