High Tide

High Tide, dir. Marco Calvani, 2024 USA, 101 min., in English and in Portuguese w/ English subtitles 🫤

Friday, June 28, 2024, 8:30 PM, Herbst Theatre (not streaming in the Digital Screening Room)

High Tide

Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) is from a small town an hour outside of São Paulo, Brazil. He came to the United States with an American tourist he met in Brazil, and they went to Provincetown, but the relationship didn’t last, dashing Lourenço’s hopes of building a life together. Instead, Lourenço works whatever odd jobs he can find “under the table” while looking for some way to change his tourist visa to a resident visa.

Lourenço has been staying rent-free with Scott (Bill Irwin), a local he met in P-town. He meets Maurice (James Bland), an attractive New Yorker who turns out to have some relationship baggage of his own, and Scott sets up a meeting with a lawyer renting the house next door, but there are many obstacles and setbacks, some of them self-inflicted. Nothing is easy for an undocumented immigrant with scarcely any support beyond a place to crash for a few weeks. Marisa Tomei was an executive producer, and also appears as Miriam.

The acting and technical aspects of the film were excellent, but the story line is relentlessly bleak and downbeat, with hardly a ray of sunshine to break up the despair, which makes it difficult for me to give this anything more than a tepid “recommended.”

Note regarding subtitles: Only the portions of dialogue in Portuguese are subtitled. Most of the dialogue is in English without subtitles.

• IMDb • Official website • Filmmaker • Twitter • Instagram: @MCalvani • Facebook • preview • Wikipedia • Rotten Tomatoes: 100% •