Film review

  • 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

     

     

     

  • Black Bag

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Soderbergh (2025)

    In Steven Soderbergh’s latest, British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is assigned to investigate the leak of a top-secret software program – code-name Severus – and nail the person(s) responsible.  George suggests completing the job in two weeks but his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), warns that ‘If Severus is deployed as intended, thousands of innocent people will die’.  So one week, then.  Only five of George’s colleagues had access to Severus, including his wife and fellow spook Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).  The potential leakers are invited to dinner at the couple’s London home, where George cooks the food and presides over round-the-table mind games – all part of his strategy to discover who’s the traitor.  The four guests are also in relationships with each other, though not married ones:  agent Freddie (Tom Burke) and satellite imagery whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela) are one item, psychologist Zoe (Naomie Harris) and senior agent James (Regé-Jean Page) another.  Uxorious George hadn’t for a moment thought Kathryn might be the guilty party:  he understood her inclusion on Meacham’s list was a mere technicality.  Once their dinner guests have left, however, George makes a chance discovery that leads him to suspect his wife.

    Black Bag‘s writer, David Koepp, has devised a plot that’s convoluted yet neat, and supplied a high-powered cast with plenty of sharp, show-off dialogue.  George and Kathryn trust each other implicitly but in their line of work they’re obliged to keep things to themselves:  ‘black bag’ is the response each gives whenever the other asks a question that can’t be answered without breaching confidentiality.  During one of George’s interrogations of Clarissa, she rails against the black bag mindset that encourages secret agents to dissimulate in their personal lives even when they’re not professionally bound to do so.  Clarissa angrily demands to know what kind of honesty there can be in a spy’s moral universe.  It’s a rhetorical question but one that matters in the story, and it prompts another question.  Black Bag is certainly clever, but how clever?

    George starts to doubt his wife after he finds a cinema ticket in a waste bin at their home; next morning, he suggests ‘a movie this week’ and names the one on the ticket; Kathryn’s happy to go see it even though, she says, she’s not heard of the movie.  It’s almost reassuring that, in Black Bag’s world of sophisticated obfuscation, characters are just as liable as in EastEnders to bin a guilty secret for another character easily to find.  Couldn’t the filmmakers think of anything better or are they amusing themselves by using such a cliché?  It’s no surprise when it transpires the binned ticket wasn’t carelessness on Kathryn’s part but a plant to deflect George into suspecting her.  But since George is super-smart, why would he suspect Kathryn rather than suspect a plant?  Whether or not Soderbergh and Koepp are having fun with this detail too, the name of the pretend movie – ‘Dark Windows’ – is surely an in-joke:  it’s a perfect summary of Black Bag’s visuals.  Most of the film takes place indoors, its palette dominated by inky blue-black and gunmetal grey; there’s usually a window in the background that looks out on a pale, colourless sky.

    Although Soderbergh and his cast clearly enjoyed themselves, the film’s air of smugness and the lead performances get in the way of making that enjoyment infectious for the audience.  Cate Blanchett, in a thin role that doesn’t begin to stretch her, so overdoes sexy inscrutability that she’s sometimes ridiculous – though is that too meant to be part of the fun?  When, late on, Kathryn and secret service boss Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan) are together in a lift and she leans across him to press the lift button, the movement is so extravagant that you feel Blanchett must be fooling around.  Yet she’s also careful throughout – even in the lift – to remind us that her every line reading, gesture or facial expression is proof of her acting skill.  Michael Fassbender is a very different problem.  He’s determined to deliver his dialogue with the minimum change of expression or tempo:  Fassbender is much more of an android here than he was playing a robot in Prometheus (2012).  The actor who was so exciting to watch in Hunger (2008), Jane Eyre (2011), Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) has vanished.  Tom Burke and Marisa Abela are more entertaining to watch:  their roles are skinny too but Burke’s wit and Abela’s vividness give proceedings a lift.  Although Pierce Brosnan is rather out of his depth in this company, that makes him more likeable – at least Brosnan seems a bit more human than either of the leads.

    Not that humanity is of interest to Soderbergh here.  It’s surely no coincidence that Black Bag‘s two most absorbing sequences depend on the technology of secret intelligence work:  when Clarissa, under George’s instructions, redirects a spy satellite to watch Kathryn meet with a Russian operative in Zurich; and when George subjects all four of Clarissa, Freddie, Zoe and James to a polygraph test.  The latter is especially deftly edited – by Soderbergh, under one of his usual aliases, Mary Ann Bernard.  (He’s also, again as usual, his own cinematographer, as Peter Andrews.)  I’m probably missing a level of irony or two, but I reckon the scene that really exposes Black Bag as less clever than it thinks is the short sequence in the cinema where George and Kathryn watch ‘Dark Shadows’.  The movie seems to be a chiller of sorts – but a fun chiller:  Kathryn cries out in alarm then giggles and scoops popcorn into her mouth.  Cate Blanchett and Steven Soderbergh mean to show us the often formidable Kathryn happily relaxing with her husband; what we actually see is Blanchett performing fear and pleasurable relief so emphatically that her character looks to be putting on an act.  This might make sense if Kathryn turned out to be the betrayer George worries that she might be.  Since she isn’t, why is she unconvincing as a person simply enjoying a movie?

    19 March 2025

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