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
