Monthly Archives: March 2025

  • Flow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Straume

    Gints Zilbalodis (2024)

    U certificate – ‘very mild threat’.  Very mild??  In the Latvian animated film Flow, the threat is nearly continuous, often life-endangering.  It starts in a forest landscape:  a variety of animals, trying to escape rapidly rising flood waters, hurtle or scrabble towards higher ground.  In the struggle for survival that follows, the central character is a cat; the main supporting cast comprises a Labrador, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a secretary bird.  The BBFC clearly takes the view that, if there are no human beings on the receiving end of a threat, it can’t amount to much.

    The line-up does mean, though, that Gints Zilbalodis’s film is my kind of animation film – one featuring animals rather than people.  Better still, these animals aren’t required to speak human dialogue.  I talked all the time to our cats and liked to think we had conversations but, when it comes to talking animals on screen, my literal-mindedness usually gets in the way – especially when their words are spoken by vocally recognisable actors.  (The first two Paddington films are an exception, thanks to the amazing chemistry of Paul King’s bear and Ben Whishaw’s voice.  I also enjoyed Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) – more for the vocal performances than the story, though the stop-motion miniatures and the overall design show Wes Anderson at his most fruitfully meticulous.)  Flow is far from a silent picture, however.  As proof of the threat levels, the cat repeatedly mews in alarm.  I didn’t really think Zilbalodis and his co-writer, Matīss Kaža, would let their protagonist perish by drowning or falling from a great height or as prey to hostile secretary birds (the main one in the story is nicer).  Even so, it’s a close shave on all three counts and the miaowing is worryingly credible.  Most of the time, the anxious cat’s saucer-like eyes aren’t much different from the lemur’s.

    Those feline eyes are somewhat stylised but Zilbalodis’s recreation of animal movements and attitudes is, for the most part, wonderfully well-observed – for the cat and the dogs (the Labrador has several sidekicks of other breeds), at any rate:  I’ll take it on trust that the same goes for the lemur and the capybara.  I especially recognised, and enjoyed, the cat’s momentary hesitation just before each of its many leaps.  There’s also a whale in evidence; it saves the cat’s life more than once but eventually lies beached in the forest (or whatever the equivalent of beached is elsewhere on dry land) and the cat lies beside the great creature, rubbing the side of its head against the whale and purring.  The detail of the animal animation is so engrossing that you almost take for granted Zilbalodis’s rendering of landscape but this is marvellous, too – not least the quality of light, particularly light shining through trees and water.  Although the geographical setting isn’t specific, it struck me as vaguely oriental:  massive cat statuary in a deserted garden; a couple of dogs with a Chinese look about them; Japanese phrases in the film’s music, composed by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe.

    For much of Flow’s eighty-five minutes, the animals’ salvation takes the form of a small, unmanned boat that stays above water – a kind of mini-ark sans Noah.  As suggested by the altruistic or affectionate behaviour already mentioned, the motley crew in Flow look out for each other – or learn to do so.  The allegorical import of the piece isn’t too hard to work out.  The diluvial effects of climate change, hostilities between different tribes of the animal kingdom – both could hardly be more salient in the narrative.  Gints Zilbalodis himself probably summed up his message as well as anyone in his acceptance speech when Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature last month – ‘We are all in the same boat.  We must work together and try to overcome our differences.’  In the last scene, the animals sit together, all pals, and look at their reflections in the water.  There are moments when the film is on the brink of sentimentality but it stays the right side.  Raising the spirits, Flow does get its audience to higher ground.

    25 March 2025

  • High Tide

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marco Calvani (2024)

    Italian writer-director Marco Calvani’s first feature, which has screened at several transatlantic festivals, now gets its European premiere at BFI Flare.  High Tide – starring Marco Pigossi, Calvani’s Brazilian husband – is set in present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Pigossi’s character Lourenço, in his mid-thirties, was an accountant in his native Brazil.  He entered the US on a tourist visa while in a relationship with an American called Joe, who’s since gone AWOL:  whenever lonesome Lourenço phones him, Joe’s voicemail message is switched on.  Lourenço is still staying in the cabin he shared with Joe, rented from kindly, much older Scott (Bill Irwin), who lives alone in an adjoining cottage.  When he’s picked up in a bar, Lourenço goes back to the other man’s place for sex but his heart isn’t in it.  With his current visa soon to expire, he’s anxious to try for a work visa:  returning to Brazil would be fraught with difficulty.  His mother thinks he went to the States to study for a Harvard business degree.  That’s what he told her at the time; he now says – they Skype regularly – that he’s managing a hotel’s finances; in fact, the only money he earns is as a house cleaner.  His mother (Gláucia Rodrigues), who doesn’t know her son is gay, is eager to see Lourenço return home and get married.  He spends a lot of his spare time swimming in the sea off Provincetown.  One day on the beach, he meets Maurice (James Bland), an African-American nurse from New York.  The two men soon share a tender sexual relationship but Lourenço still pines for Joe.

    From the start, Marco Calvani lays on thick Sebastian Plano’s melancholy cello music, at pains to stress how unhappy his principals are.  Lourenço mourns the vanished Joe.  James mourns his recently deceased father whom he loved and who, when James came out as gay, was more understanding than his mother.  (Like Lourenço, James was raised Catholic.)  Scott, a long-time resident of the place, tells Lourenço how he and his partner, like many other gay men during the AIDS crisis, moved to Provincetown as a refuge – as a place for ‘healing or dying’.  ‘I healed, he died,’ explains Scott; decades later, he, too, still seems to be in mourning.  It’s striking that, whereas each of these three men is conspicuously but peacefully sad, the only significant straight male in High Tide, Bob (Sean Mahon), whose house Lourenço cleans, is conspicuously angry – chiefly because his marriage broke up when his artist wife, Miriam (Marisa Tomei), decided to live with another woman.  Striking also that Miriam is just as angry when she first appears – Bob masochistically agrees to decorate her new home, with Lourenço’s help – and trades abusive insults with her ex-husband.  Later, when Lourenço has taken over the decorating single-handed and Miriam befriends him, she’s as benign, pacific and gently regretful as he, James and Scott are.  Minor queer characters in the film serve a mainly comic purpose:  a one-note queeny pair (Todd Flaherty, Karl Gregory) who, with Crystal (Mya Taylor), are pals of James; Scott’s lawyer friend, Todd (Bryan Batt), who Scott hopes can solve Lourenço’s visa problems.  But the situation of the main gay men in High Tide is presented as essentially tragic.

    The lawyer isn’t much help (he’s a corporate lawyer), beyond saying he can put Lourenço in touch with someone who could maybe help more.  This isn’t, though, why Lourenço abruptly exits the meeting with Todd at Scott’s place.  Todd soon shows himself to be less than fully enlightened on matters of queer identity.  When Scott laments the fact that Provincetown still doesn’t have an LGBTQIAP+ museum, Todd jokes about the ever-lengthening string of letters, asks what ‘P’ stands for (pansexual, as Scott confirms), and queries how the asexual qualify for inclusion on a list ‘defined by sex’.  Although Bryan Batt overplays Todd’s cavalier camp, it’s a pity this interesting exchange between him and Scott doesn’t last longer; instead, Calvani makes Scott’s sharp reminder that ‘We’re not defined by sex’ the last word on the subject (though Todd, when he uses the phrase ‘defined by sex’, is surely referring to sexual orientation rather than biological identity).  It’s when Todd, changing the subject, blithely remarks that he doesn’t have Black friends that Lourenço, keenly aware of James’s sensitivities around race, takes his leave.

    He quickly gets changed and heads for a ‘sinners and saints’ party at a club where he knows he’ll find James and the rest of his group.  Everyone at the party gets dressed up/made up as a particular saint or sinner:  I couldn’t identify any of the people they were meant to be – and I didn’t hear what drug Lourenço’s companions were doing in the club toilets.  Lourenço himself takes the drug, for the first time in his life, in reaction to devastating news that he receives at the shindig.  Another man there, whom he recognises and talks to, mentions that Joe is getting married, assuming that Lourenço already knows.  Things don’t improve the next day when, after surviving his bad trip, Lourenço discovers that Scott was also in the picture about Joe but didn’t tell Lourenço in order ‘to protect you’.

    High Tide’s rather languorous pace picks up in the closing stages.  In the film’s opening scene, Lourenço runs down a beach, panting hard, tears off all his clothes and swims out to sea.  Calvani makes clear, in reprising this moment, that it follows Lourenço’s brief encounter with a stranger at the beach, whom he fellates.  Lourenço, disgusted with himself and hopeless, seems to mean to drown himself but this proves to be the first of several scenes that look set to be the final scene but turn out not to be.  Lourenço returns to Scott’s and weeps in his arms.  The following morning, he has been cleaning Bob’s place when James turns up there to announce he’s about to catch the ferry out of Provincetown.  Lourenço knows from their very first meeting that James is soon to leave the US to start a new life working in Angola – ‘a country’, says James, ‘where there are more sheep than people’.  (Since it’s also an African country that recently decriminalised same-sex relations, Angola makes dual sense as a destination for James.)  This parting outside Bob’s house is therefore a final farewell:  Lourenço and James hug each other for some time before James goes on his way.  After a few moments’ thought, Lourenço leaps into romcom finale mode and heads, on his dodgy bike, for the ferry – but he’s too late:  the ship has sailed.  Perhaps not too late, though:  in what really is High Tide‘s last scene, Lourenço is on the phone to his mother.  He has something to tell her.  ‘Do you know’, he asks in a cautiously cheerful voice, ‘that there are some countries with more sheep than people?’

    High Tide isn’t a bad film.  Marco Pigossi gives a strong performance in the lead.  He’s well supported by James Bland, as statuesque but vulnerable Maurice, and by Marisa Tomei, whom it’s good to see again, even in this small part.  The cinematographer, Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, gets plenty of emotional texture into the varied locations – the seascapes, Scott’s flower-filled garden, the small, shadowy bedrooms.  But you end up feeling that Marco Calvani has overworked the romantic misery.  For as long as Lourenço can still hope for his return, Joe seems to be his heart’s desire.  It’s only when Maurice is disappearing from his life that Lourenço perceives they’re meant for each other.  You can and do sympathise with Lourenço’s immigrant predicament, and with Maurice’s sense of being, even as an American citizen, an outsider because of the colour of his skin.  But neither these plights nor their sexuality is developed or made distinctive enough to sustain a feature-length drama.

    23 March 2025

     

     

     

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