Film review

  • Tangerine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Baker (2015)

    The coming attractions concluded with a trailer for the hardy perennial It’s a Wonderful Life.   The trailers were followed by Tangerine, a very different kind of Christmas movie – although it is set in Hollywood or, at least, in the underbelly of Hollywood.  On the morning of Christmas Eve, a trans woman called Sin-Dee Rella meets her friend and fellow sex worker Alexandra, also a trans woman, in an eatery called Donut Time.  Sin-Dee Rella has just completed a twenty-eight day prison sentence.  She learns from her friend that Chester, Sin-Dee-Rella’s boyfriend and pimp, cheated on her while she was inside.  Sin-Dee storms out of Donut Time and embarks on a search of the neighbourhood for Chester – and for Dinah, the girl he’s been sleeping with.  Although she’s preparing for her lounge-singing debut in a West Hollywood bar later on Christmas Eve, Alexandra agrees to accompany Sin-Dee on her quest, on condition there will be no ‘dramas’.  As if:  it’s not long before Alexandra leaves Sin-Dee to it.  The search for Chester and Dinah is intercut with scenes from the working day of Razmik, an Armenian immigrant taxi driver in the area.

    Since its first showing at this year’s Sundance, Sean Baker’s Tangerine has attracted a good deal of media attention as a feature film shot entirely on an iPhone (to be precise:  on three iPhone 5s, by Baker and his cinematographer, Radium Cheung).  The first test for this film is how long it takes viewers to engage with it as the comedy-drama it means to be, instead of seeing it primarily as a low-tech moviemaking feat.  In my case, this happened very quickly – and I remembered only every so often the unusual way in which the film had been made.  (Not thinking about that may be more difficult for those with a more developed technical sense.)  Tangerine is visually kinetic and vivid – the lurid colouring gives the LA skies and streets a sometimes psychedelic, sometimes infernal flavour.   But I was increasingly depressed by the film, and bored by the central story.  The movie is a long 88 minutes.

    Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Sin-Dee Rella) and Maya Taylor (Alexandra) are themselves transgender but Tangerine is neither as liberal-minded nor as innovative as its right-on casting and ultra-modern technique might lead you to expect.  There are jokes that depend on the native maleness of the two main characters.  Alexandra deals with a cheating client with enough brute force to reduce him to jelly – he complains cravenly to the police about the treatment she’s meted out.  When she eventually locates the brothel where Dinah works, Sin-Dee-Rella makes her entrance by kicking in the front door.  Razmik’s suspicious mother-in-law is a different sort of cliché:  she’s the familiar, choleric, ethnic battleaxe.  Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, with whom Baker wrote the screenplay, are unsympathetic in their presentation of heterosexual men:  as well as Alexandra’s contemptible client, there are the physically risible and/or repulsive male customers in the knocking shop from which Sin-Dee-Rella abducts Dinah.  The principals in Tangerine advertise the rightness of freedom of sexual self-expression yet the movie discriminates on the question of when doing your thing is doing the right thing.

    Razmik (Karren Karagulian) is the least obvious character in the film.   You often feel sorry for this pale-faced, persistently harassed man because of what he has to put up with – whether it’s a passenger throwing up in his cab or the matriarchy swarming round the Christmas dinner table when he gets home from work.  Because Razmik seems ordinary, the revelation of his sexual preferences has a relatively strong impact:  he uses part of his earnings to pay for blowjobs in his cab – but only from trans women.  When he picks up a prostitute and discovers she’s non-trans, he gets angry and chucks her out of the car.  Razmik’s disgust at what he sees as violation of the proper sexual order is both startling and funny.  The strongest sequence in the film – visually and emotionally – comes when Alexandra, who regularly services Razmik, gives him a blowjob while the cab is in a carwash.  Sean Baker keeps his iPhone camera on the liquid, steamed up lights of the carwash and the effect is transporting; you suppose the effect for Razmik of what Alexandra is doing in the front of the cab may be similar.  Before taking her leave of him, Alexandra gives Razmik another present – an air freshener to expel the lingering stench of dried vomit that he tried earlier, in an unavailing interior carwash, to remove.  The air freshener is in the shape, and has the fragrance of, a tangerine.  This is an eccentric but authentic Christmas-movie moment.

    It’s a pity that Sean Baker also relies on Razmik to bring Tangerine to an implausible tragicomic climax.  After he finishes work for the day, the oppressiveness of the Christmas celebrations and the thought of Alexandra combine to drive him out of his apartment and back to his cab – to the consternation of his wife Yeva (Luisa Nersisyan) and the fury of her fearsome mother Ashken (Alla Tumanian).   He heads first for the club where Alexandra was singing but, by the time he arrives, the show is already over and she’s headed off.  Ashken gets herself a taxi and finds out from another Armenian driver (Arsen Grigoryan) that her son-in-law has not, as he claimed, returned to work for a few more hours.  Baker contrives to get all the main characters together in Donut Time for a series of showdowns – Sin-Dee Rella, Alexandra, Chester (James Ransone), Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), Razmik, Ashken and, eventually, Yeva.   (Ashken, once she’s discovered Razmik in the company of the trans sex workers, phones her daughter to deliver the news.)  I just didn’t believe that the long-suffering Razmik, with his well-established routine for mixing business with pleasure, would jeopardise it in this way.   The memory of the carwash and the smell of the tangerine would be enough to see a man who’s thankful for small mercies (and not so small mercies: he and Yeva also have a young daughter) through the rigours of a gruesome Christmas family get-together.

    I’ve concentrated on Razmik rather than the centre of the film because I can’t find much of interest in Sin-Dee Rella or Alexandra.  Razmik’s outrage that the prostitute in his cab isn’t transgender is witty recognition that the people in the world of Tangerine subscribe to a code of behaviour – just as sexual fuddy-duddies, from whom they seem so different, have codes of behaviour.  With the main characters, however, Baker is doing something that’s more clever than imaginative.  He recycles a story of friendship and betrayal and time-honoured screen depictions of prostitutes (wisecracking on the outside but crying inside) – and puts them in a sexually transgressive gift wrap.  This is clever not only because plenty of people will be wary of denigrating the film on account of its politically correct accoutrements but also because the sentimental elements of the material are used to persuade the viewer that Tangerine is tender as well as tough.  When Alexandra performs in the bar, for example, Mya Taylor sings well and touchingly.  I thought she sang improbably well but I could see it made sense from Sean Baker’s point of view to press this particular audience button.  Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez both give good performances and their faces are effectively complementary.  Rodriguez’s (at least until she removes her wig at the very end of the film) is softer, more feminine, whereas Taylor’s strong jawline gives her the look of a transgender work in progress.  It’s arguable whether the casting of trans women makes the characters they play more convincing than they would have been with cisgender actors in the roles.  ‘Cisgender actors’, in this case, would almost certainly have meant male actors.  This would have resulted in so much attention being given to their Remarkable Transformation that I’m glad Baker cast the film as he did.

    Razmik isn’t the only character who eclipses Sin-Dee and Alexandra.  There’s also the hapless Dinah, a prostitute who’s very different from either of them.  Sin-Dee is mixed race; Alexandra is African-American; both are strikingly good-looking and fast, sassy talkers.  Dinah is thin, white, skanky, drab and dim.  She ends up alone, locked out of the grungy brothel where she worked until Sin-Dee yanked her out by her hair a few hours previously.  Dinah sits in the dark, shivering in her flimsy, sleeveless top.   There’s no denying the power of this image but it made me uncomfortable for a reason that I wasn’t sure Sean Baker intended.  The implication of his film is that life on the streets may be hard but is also a rich human experience provided that it’s an expression of I-am-what-I-am self-assertion, as it seems to be for Sin-Dee and Alexandra.  Selling your body for a living has no such saving graces, however, if you’re an unprepossessing ‘fish’ – a derogatory term for a non-trans woman, which Sin-Dee uses to describe Dinah.  I think Dinah is disturbing too because she leaves the residue of something grimly real.   Sin-Dee and Alexandra are never not characters in a movie.

    22 November 2015

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ang Lee (1995)

    Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, with a screenplay by Emma Thompson, was released in British cinemas a few weeks after the BBC’s transmission of a six-part Pride and Prejudice, written by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton.  This Pride and Prejudice was not only a big hit at the time; it proved to be influential in subsequent adaptations of Jane Austen and in updating popular perceptions of Austen’s world.  It also advanced the screen acting career of Colin Firth, who played Mr Darcy.  This was thanks largely to the sequence, invented by Andrew Davies, in which Darcy emerges from swimming in a lake, clothed but transparently soaked through.  That sequence, described by Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian in 2003 as ‘one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history’, epitomises how the 1995 Pride and Prejudice revitalised Jane Austen in the public imagination.  It was seminal in developing what now seems to be a truth universally acknowledged – that it’s possible for men in Austen novels to be hunks.  They might even get-their-kit-off (sort of).  According to Wikipedia, it was watching this Pride and Prejudice that inspired Helen Fielding to write Bridget Jones’s Diary.  Fielding’s novel featured a love interest named for Mr Darcy and played, when the book reached the big screen in 2001, by Colin Firth.

    The 1995 Sense and Sensibility, though humorous enough, is never frivolous:  it’s a welcome corrective to the dripping Darcy school of Austen adaptation.  Ang Lee’s film was screened this month as one of the events of ‘Fools for Love – Jane Austen Day’ at BFI and introduced by people in Austen-style costumes.  They demonstrated the language of the fan[1].  They joked in olde-English.  They felt sure we would adore Sense and Sensibility before the lucky ones among us headed for the climax of the day’s proceedings, a Regency ball in the Benugo bar.  For a killjoy like me, Lee’s movie was a welcome corrective to all this too.  There’s scarcely a juddering fan to be seen throughout the film, which stresses the implications of a patrilineal inheritance system, the large differences in wealth within families, the consequently and grimly serious business of making a suitable marriage.  All these things are salient in Emma Thompson’s screenplay.  The Taiwanese Ang Lee comes to the material from another country as well as a different century.  He brings to bear, in combination with an outsider’s eye, a nearer personal understanding of, to use Lee’s own words, the tension of ‘social repression against free will’.  His perspective sharpens the focus on that tension and on the themes stressed by Thompson.  This supplies the film with a sustained astringent streak, which steers it well clear of comfortable, frocks-and-balls nostalgia.

    Sense and Sensibility is long (136 minutes), and feels long, compared with Douglas McGrath’s remarkably streamlined Emma, released the following year, but it’s always intelligent and absorbing.  The visual scale is eloquent:  Lee and his cinematographer, Michael Coulter, consistently present rooms, houses and grounds of varying size to convey, without over-emphasising, different gradations on the social scale.  There are times when the movie verges on being excessively glum, an impression reinforced by parts of Patrick Doyle’s score and the repeatedly foul weather in which the sequences outdoors take place.  The ending, though, is close to startling, and impressive in its abrupt change of tone.  The viewer’s participation in the wedding celebrations of both Elinor and Marianne Dashwood is abbreviated.  Lee pulls up and away from the friends and family greeting the two pairs of newlyweds, as they emerge from church.  He focuses instead on an isolated figure on horseback, watching from a regretful distance, high on a hillside.  This man is John Willoughby, who broke Marianne Dashwood’s heart because, we learn, he didn’t have the money to marry for love.

    Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet are very effectively complementary as the contrasting Dashwood sisters, Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility).  Emma Thompson shows a confident awareness of the camera:  her playing is understated but always emotionally expressive.  The familiar whining twang in her voice grates occasionally but this is a first-rate characterisation:  Thompson’s Elinor is finely poised between maturing beauty and lifelong spinsterhood.  As a result of Thompson’s restraint, Elinor’s momentary loss of self-control is powerful and affecting, when she learns, with incredulous relief, that the man she loves, Edward Ferrars, isn’t married after all.  (Elinor has just heard talk of ‘Mr Ferrars’ and his new bride, the former Lucy Steele.  It turns out that Lucy, who was engaged to Edward, jilted him in favour of his brother, Robert.)  Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh had shown in their interpretations of Beatrice and Benedick in Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) how to play Shakespeare refreshingly and respectfully.  Thompson achieves something similar with her translation of Jane Austen from page to screen, and in her portrait of Elinor.

    Kate Winslet, in only her second cinema role (after Heavenly Creatures, the previous year), is splendid.  Winslet has, from the start, a funny cussedness. Shortly after their father’s death, Marianne sits at the piano playing a doleful piece; Elinor suggests that she change her tune out of respect for their grieving mother (Gemma Jones) and Winslet switches decisively, to an even more miserable piece of music.  Winslet has a wonderful emotional vibrancy and openness in the first half of the film.  She shows us more as Marianne develops from an impulsively romantic girl into one whose eventual marriage to a second-best suitor makes sense to her, as well as to the audience.  Completely in love with Willoughby (Greg Wise) and puzzled as to why he hasn’t already proposed to her, Marianne unexpectedly sees him at a London soiree:  her strength of feeling and lack of caution propel her immediately in his direction.  Her approach to him – this is not the done thing – is a lovely moment that makes Willoughby’s subsequent rejection of Marianne all the more poignant.  Unlike her naturally contained, watchful elder sister, Marianne has to master the art of masking her feelings.  There’s a virtual correspondence between this process and Kate Winslet’s progress in the course of the film.  We can see that, at this stage of their careers, Emma Thompson was a more sophisticated performer; we also see Winslet, before our eyes, getting triumphantly to grips with the art of screen acting.  It’s a delight to watch.

    So is Elizabeth Spriggs.  She is Mrs Jennings, the mother-in-law of Sir John Middleton (Robert Hardy), the wealthy cousin of Mrs Dashwood who offers her and her daughters residency of a small cottage on his Devon estate.  Playing a garrulous, eccentric nosey-parker, Elizabeth Spriggs is theatrically comic but her histrionics are anchored in a rounded (in every sense) humanity.   Spriggs’s performance is an object lesson in how to make a Jane Austen character characterful without making her tedious.   As Mrs Jennings’s even more loquacious daughter, Charlotte, Imelda Staunton pairs up beautifully with Spriggs.  Staunton gives herself so fully to the role that she’s empathetic with the often ridiculous Charlotte.  She never seems to be taking the piss – something that Harriet Walter, as the Dashwood sisters’ snotty sister-in-law, teeters on the brink of doing.   Twelve-year-old Emilie François is excellent as Margaret, Elinor’s and Marianne’s younger sister.

    What a pity that Elinor Dashwood’s heart belongs to Hugh Grant.  As Edward Ferrars, he tries but what seems meant to be a charmingly distrait manner looks and sounds phony.  Because he always seems a fraud, Grant’s only good moment comes when Edward’s secret betrothal to Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs) is revealed – when, in other words, Elinor discovers he’s not what she imagined him to be.  It’s much harder to see why she was bowled over by Edward in the first place and continues to love him even while he’s spoken for.  None of the contributions from the men in the cast compares with the star turns from the women but Grant’s performance is the only real weakness, and there’s good work from Hugh Laurie, James Fleet and Oliver Ford Davies.  Laurie, as Charlotte’s husband, switches persuasively from laconic sarcasm, in the face of his wife’s relentless yattering, to quiet sympathy with Elinor, when Marianne is gravely ill.  James Fleet, as John, the elder half-brother of Elinor and Marianne, has a winning unease about inheriting entirely the estate of their late father (Tom Wilkinson).  Ford Davies, alert and urgent, is the doctor who supervises Marianne’s recovery.  Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon is interesting casting.  Brandon loves Marianne at first sight – although she’s not the first woman he’s loved – but his feelings are not reciprocated (even when they finally marry).  Rickman’s weary, sonorous voice and disappointed look, although distinctive, set him up a shade obviously as a thwarted romantic spirit but he’s engaging, and there’s a particularly striking detail in his playing of Brandon.  At moments of high anxiety, Rickman feels for a piece of furniture like a blind man needing support from it.

    21 November 2015

     

    [1] I mean fan as in device for creating an air current – not fan as in devotee …

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