Indies in P’town

Filmed in Provincetown, High Tide evoked cries of recognition from the PIFF audience, which was primed to love this boy-meets-boy, boy-loses-boy romance. Nor is this the first time a film set in P’town has been screened at the festival (a “meta” moment?). That Provincetown is location bait for filmmakers is not hard to explain. There are those lingering sunsets over the water and the quaintness of Commercial Street, but there’s also an intensity that makes for high drama, or comedy. Start with the high concentration of LGBT people in a small area and add one crucial ingredient: the clock is ticking. Almost everyone you meet is there for a limited stay, whether a weekend or a week or even the season, which is all too short. A relationship can move through the entire arc from meeting to falling in love to saying goodbye in just the allotted time—or at least that’s how it works in the romcoms. Real life, of course, is never so simple. As their time winds down, decisions will have to be made. Where do we go from here?

            In High Tide, the meeting of the two principals doesn’t occur until we’ve established that Lourenço, an undocumented Brazilian immigrant, is a young man living on the razor’s edge, getting by on odd jobs at the whim of his erratic bosses. We learn that his former boyfriend, who was also his U.S. sponsor, recently walked out, leaving him with a visa that’s set to expire. The taciturn Lourenço spends his free time alone on the beach, but the outgoing Maurice, who’s there with friends, calls out as he passes by and insists on talking. They make a date and it goes well; they spend the night together; they seem to be falling in love. But the clock is ticking—on the visa, on Maurice’s time in town (he works as a nurse in New York City). The film allows us, as it must, to hope that all the obstacles to their staying together can somehow be overcome.

     One thing the two men share is a sense of victimhood—Maurice as a Black gay man, Lourenço as an exploited immigrant. And yet, their connection remains a fragile one; a single incident could throw everything into jeopardy. When it comes, it involves a simple misunderstanding, and here is where an ongoing source of frustration with this film rises to the fore. Lourenço is one of those brooding, silent types whose unwillingness to explain himself is undoubtedly part of his “rizz.” But sometimes this reticence means leaving an awful lot to chance.