Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015) : USA

Reviewed by Nathan Pécout. Viewed at Antioch University/SBIFF 2016.

Tangerine brought public attention to itself in 2015 for being the first film entirely shot on an Iphone. But director and writer Sean Baker deserves recognition for more than that.

The movie experiments in many ways. First, the film was shot on an Iphone, as mentioned previously. This technique redefines certain codes of cinematography due to the unusual size of the device and allows new possibilities in terms of shooting. Secondly, the lead actors, Kiki Rodriguez (as Sin-Dee) and Mya Taylor (as Alexandra), are non-professional actors and are even barely acting : they are real-life transgender women Baker met only a few months before shooting the film. Thus, the nature of their performance becomes very specific : are they engaging in a highly expressionistic acting style, or is the exuberance of their characters coming from their actual personalities ? The thin line separating real attitudes and acting makes the film very credible.

Sean Baker depicts here a very particular fringe of society, the one of transgender sex workers. We quickly realize within the movie that these girls are unusually masculine. This population is a minority that must be one of the less priviliged in the American society. But in Tangerine, these people are not deviant : the two main characters being black transgender prostitutes, their condition is set as the norm in the film. We witness their life, their habits, and nobody looks at them funny. Ramzik, the cab driver (Karren Karagulian) who is a regular client of these transgender prostitutes, is even disgusted when he realizes a girl he solicited is an actual female. The only person who finds transgender women intolerable is Ramzik’s Armenian mother-in-law.

The picturesque characters of Tangerine evolve in a colorful environment that was filmed using new methods. The use of Iphones as video cameras led to uncommon techniques, explained by Sean Baker himself. One of them was used for the dynamic tracking shots that occur during the fastest moments of the film : Baker filmed the scene while driving his bike, creating a very specific kind of camera movement resulting from his freedom and his speed while shooting. The result is accompanied by fast-tempo music and gives a strong dynamism to the scene that does not contain a lot of action apart from one of the girls quickly walking through Santa Monica.

By shuffling the norms of American society upside down and using new technological possibilities, Baker calls attention on the status of this minority who represents a proper population of society, and delivers a film that is innovative, audacious, and meaningful at the same time.

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Published:
02.21.16 / 2pm
Category:
Films, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2016