Tangerine

If you know one thing about Tangerine, it's probably that Sean Baker, the film's savvy director, shot the entire thing on an iPhone 5S. This fact generated the kind of Sundance buzz that surrounded Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi at the festival in 1992, when all anyone seemed to talk about was that movie's impossibly low budget. It's fun to ooh and aah over such feats of resourcefulness, but I generally steer clear of movies distinguished chiefly by their inexpensive production costs. For instance, I didn't see El Mariachi until many years after its theatrical run, and I still regret missing the opportunity to watch that terrific film on a big screen. So I'm glad I got over my bias and avoided making the same mistake with Tangerine.

When you hear about a movie made on an iPhone, you might assume it's somebody's first film, and Tangerine does feel like the début of a novice, albeit an extremely skilled one. But Baker’s career in features and television dates back to 2000, and while I haven’t seen any of his previous work, I will certainly be seeking it out now. Tangerine’s no-budget approach was probably necessitated by its subject matter. The film's multi-pronged narrative follows Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two transitioning male-to-female prostitutes, as they spend a memorable Christmas Eve in their usual haunts: the seedy streets, back alleys, bars, and donut shops near the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd and Highland Avenue in Hollywood. Over the course of the film, we also get to know their pimp, their johns, their fellow sex workers, and an Armenian cab driver who also works these streets. 

These simple interwoven storylines provide an abundance of comedy, pathos, and insight without ever becoming complex or cluttered. Tangerine provides an intriguing glimpse into the lives of people rarely explored on the big screen. Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch penned the script in close collaboration with Rodriguez and Taylor, incorporating their stories and experiences as well as those of other transgender prostitutes in their community. The resulting picture feels authentic and human, shifting nimbly from uproariously funny scenes to heartbreakingly sad ones. It takes a skillful filmmaker to navigate such tonal shifts, and to craft a picture around such provocative subject matter that manages to be entertaining without lapsing into exploitation or condescension.

While the harsh LA sun and the iPhone 5’s single focal-length lens limit the cinematic vocabulary available to Baker, he avoids visual monotony by structuring his narrative around the natural shift from day to night, as well as the range of spaces and interior lighting found in the shops, bars, motels, homes, and other practical locations his characters inhabit. Multi-pronged ensemble plots that take place over a single day or night have been a staple of low-budget pictures since George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), but aside from Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do The Right Thing (1989), I can’t think of another film that utilizes this organic time structure so deliberately and effectively.

For all of Baker’s evident skill, Tangerine's greatest strengths are Rodriguez and Taylor, both of whom are compelling, attractive, and deeply sympathetic. Taylor, a former sex worker and model who had just begun hormone therapy when production began, grounds the picture with a quiet dignity. The manically irrepressible Rodriguez is the flashier of the two, but her Sin-Dee never dips into campy caricature, and, amazingly, her verbal onslaught of slang and profanity never becomes tedious. You’d be forgiven for assuming, during the rapid-fire opening scene, that these first-time actors might not be capable of anything more than one-note performances. But as the story progresses, both Taylor and Rodriguez uncover surprising layers of complexity in their multifaceted characters.

The blend of colorful surrealism and gritty verisimilitude in this film recalls the work of Pedro Almodóvar, as well as Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985)—both great films which were once viewed as transgressive, which now seems quaint. But Tangerine also possesses the passionate energy and hilariously confrontational dialogue of a contemporary off-off Broadway play you'd see in a hole-in-the-wall downtown New York theatre. Indeed, at the end of the film, when all the disparate characters converge in a single location and have it out, the feeling is very much that of a stage farce. But rather than hobbling this lithe film's free-form and anarchic spirit, the extended climax escalates the proceedings to an uproarious crescendo that nevertheless maintains both credibility and poignancy.

An iPhone-shot movie about the lives of transgender sex workers may seem like the cutting edge of au courant indie cinema, but there's something refreshingly classical about this film in terms of its narrative construction, editorial pacing, and directorial approach. The talent both in front of and behind the iPhone easily qualifies Tangerine as one of the year’s best pictures.