"High Tide": Two guys discover the unrelenting agony of gay life. In Provincetown. With a heck of a lot of n*de dudes

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I don't usually watch gay-specific movies: they're too angsty, presenting coming out as an unbearable trauma and life after coming out as endless heartache, loneliness, and emptiness.   But High Tide (2024) is set in the gay resort of Provincetown, and it has a lot of n*de photos.  Surely the guys can't be depressed, lonely, and empty while looking at d*cks?  But I'll check out the trailer first, to make sure.

Scene 1: Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) runs onto a deserted beach, takes off his clothes, and runs into the ocean.  Then, clothed again, he sits on the deserted boardwalk, then stares into space, depressed.

Left: Lourenço as a tiny speck in the vast ocean.  The insignificance of human life...

Scene 2: He asks an older guy, "Have you heard from Joe?" 

 The older guy is irate: "You left him!"  So you should never hear from him or about him again?  But in gay communities, ex-lovers are our closest friends. 

Then: "True love is something else!"

 

Lourenço starts to cry.

Scene 3: He sits despondent on the boardwalk agin, then meets a cute guy, Maurice (James Bland).  No one has been named Maurice since Samantha's father on "Bewitched."  It must be a homage to the early gay novel by E.M. Forster.  

They splash about on the beach, then sit down with a lady in a revealing swimsuit.  

Lady: "So you're Brazilian.  What do you do?" 

"I clean houses."

Montage of our boy cleaning houses.  This is portrayed as the ultimate in humiliation. 

More n*de beach guys on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.  Seriously, what is there to be depressed about?

Scene 4: Establishing shot of Provincetown, as Lourenço explains that he's here on a tourist visa, so technically he can't work, but he has to, because he needs the money...

The older guy tells him, "You're young and handsome.  You can do anything."

Scene 5: Lourenço and Mauricio head to the bedroom and kiss (that's all we see in the trailer).  A review gushes: "Sexy, sad, and just the ticket."

More after the break

Scene 6: Evening beach bonfire, followed by a horrifying scene in a disco, all red tinged, with the most decadent types since Cruising gyrating around uncontrollably, and the agonized laughter of the damned.  I'm not kidding.  The director definitely wants us to think that being gay means never having any fun.

Lourenço:  "I always wanted to come to the U.S.  I thought this was the best place in the world." 

Maurice disagrees: "Everything is so broken here."  Dude, everything is broken everywhere.  In this movie, gay life is unrelenting brokenness.

The old guy sees Maurice trashing a house, and asks "May I help you?"  Mauricio grabs a weapon to attack him.  So he's got some skeletons in his closet, too.

Scene 7: A woman in a bathrobe flirts with Lorenzo, who tells her:  "I'm not afraid of being alone."

We don't see whether they hook up or not.  Next shot: he's kissing Maurice, then saying: "I've said too many lies already."  So you're not on a tourist visa, you don't clean houses, you don't have an ex-boyfriend who the old guy won't tell you about, or what?

Scene 8: Agonized running, a tiny speck amid the vastness of Provincetown.  A lot of vastness in this trailer.

The flirty woman says: "You might break someone's heart." Oh, he's definitely going to break some hearts, get his heart broken, and never find a stable gay relationship.  

Scene 9: Lourenço and Maurice kiss again.  Then the flirty woman makes breakfast.

Scene 10: Lourenço gazes despondently out a bus or train window at a sunset, symbolic of our dissolution into existential sadness, as he leaves Provincetown and Mauricio forever. 

The IMDB blurb adds some intel:  he's an undocumented alien (so the tourist visa was a lie), and "hearbroken" (you dumped him!).  When the guys fall in love, "they have to "reconcile their pasts with their uncertain future."  I wonder what Maurice did.

Wikipedia quotes some reviews: "poignant," "devastating," "steeped in melancholy and raw pain."

Why on Earth would I want to spend two hours being devastated and experiencing raw pain?  For entertainment?

F*ck the Sadness.  How about some bare chests from Workaholics?

See also: Workaholics, Episode 6.1: Blake is gay in this one, but don't worry, Adam still likes d*cks. With bonus Dane c*ck...I mean Cook

"Final Destination: Blood Legacy": Death has a wacky sense of humor. With Travis Turner, the gay guy from "Chucky," and a n*de security guard

Howard Cruse: Gay comics at their most depressing.