A scattered however intimate drama a few queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s “Excessive Tide” boasts an impeccable main efficiency that buoys the film even at its weakest. Strung collectively by light moments, it follows Brazilian émigré Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) as he anticipates the return of his American lover in Provincetown — Massachusetts’ homosexual promised land — whereas working out the clock on his visa. As kindness and cruelty tear Lourenço asunder, Pigossi delivers a shocking efficiency that virtually heat-welds collectively the movie’s disparate elements, making it really feel complete regardless of the failings in its building.

From the second “Excessive Tide” opens, Calvani calls for his viewers’s consideration by the distinction of light waves caressing the shore and the stark picture of Lourenço stripping off his garments and lunging in direction of the ocean in a second of emotional disaster. This scene returns later within the movie, bolstered by extra narrative context, however dangling it earlier than the viewer this manner conjures photos of undocumented migrants taking desperately to the water in quest of refuge.

Lourenço isn’t fairly a refugee, neither is he “undocumented” within the literal sense (regardless of the time period getting used to explain him quite a few instances). Quite, his vacationer visa is about to run out, and the path to staying on within the U.S. legally is winding and fraught with mile-high hurdles, regardless of his specialised accounting diploma. So, whereas ready for his sweetheart Joe to return — the actual circumstances between the couple are left ambiguous at first — he takes up under-the-table odd jobs cleansing and portray wealthy folks’s summer time houses, whereas residing within the tiny visitor home of a buddy of Joe’s, the kindly, conversational, often overbearing Scott (Invoice Irwin), an older homosexual man who turns into his short-term anchor.

As he waits for Joe, Lourenço finally meets Maurice (James Bland), a sexy, soft-spoken Black physician from Queens on his strategy to a residency in Angola. Regardless of being yet one more impermanent fixture in Lourenço’s life, Maurice supplies him with a quick sufficient spark to start reconsidering his seemingly dire circumstances — or quite, to start seeing them in a brand new mild. Their dynamic is nice, if usually overwrought in its writing, particularly when Calvani makes an attempt to fold malformed critiques of white queerness into his purview.

Whether or not recollections of racial animus or confessions of need, the spoken phrases with which Pigossi and Bland are saddled echo an amateurish highschool stage productions. Nonetheless, they’re carried out with sincerity and innocence at each flip. Pigossi is particularly adept at taking these function-first traces of dialogue and imbuing them with longing. He harbors a deep uncertainty behind his eyes, however a soulfulness as nicely, which he alchemizes right into a efficiency that’s each lovely and devastating (even when the film round him usually converges towards the trite and acquainted).

Government producer Marisa Tomei and “Tangerine” star Mya Taylor present up in minor supporting roles that, regardless of their brevity, enable each girls to supply significant, energetic distinction to Pigossi’s reserve. However finally, what permits “Excessive Tide” to work regardless of itself is its liberating sense of vulnerability. Courtesy of cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, its tight close-ups of locked eyes, smiling mouths, bare stretch marks and ft wrapped round lovers’ waists mix to create a mode of hypnotic cinematic intimacy, which the movie ceaselessly enters for prolonged stretches.

Past the overwhelming uncertainty of Lourenço’s visa conundrum, few of the film’s far-flung social themes discover themselves aestheticized or dramatized with a lot precision. Nonetheless, Pigossi takes this concept of impermanence and transforms it so deftly into a way of instability — of shifting sand beneath one’s ft — that he warps the movie round himself, making it really feel unpredictable whilst acquainted romantic beats and gestures play out on-screen. It’s a radiant, heartfelt efficiency that not solely retains “Excessive Tide” fascinating, however makes it really feel exuberant once in a while too.