THE INDY FILM CLUB

In Tangerine’s tale of trans sex workers, hope and despair go hand in hand

Hollywood, for decades, has depicted the trans sex worker as a tragic victim or crass punchline. As Clarisse Loughrey writes, ‘Tangerine’ is the vital reality check

Saturday 25 July 2020 12:26 BST
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Mya Taylor, left, and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in the 2015 film
Mya Taylor, left, and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in the 2015 film

In Tangerine, the camera zips down LA’s streets like a curious fly. It circles pedestrians in tight, aerial loops. It dives in so close to their faces that, at any moment, it feels like a hand might reach out and swat it away. There are many souls to follow here, as they pace up and down sidewalks, each on their own private odyssey. Tangerine chooses to tail two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), who we first meet over a celebratory doughnut.

Sin-Dee, fresh from a month-long stint in prison for drug possession, discovers that her boyfriend-slash-pimp Chester (James Ransone) has been unfaithful – worst of all, with a “fish” (a cisgender woman). Her name is Dana or Desiree or Dinah. The name definitely starts with a D. Sin-Dee heads out on the warpath, with a nervous Alexandra in tow. Occasionally, the camera will turn its attention to Razmik (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian cab driver and one of Alexandra’s regular clients. Today is Christmas Eve. Family duty calls him home, but his mind keeps drifting elsewhere.

At its 2015 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Tangerine was treated as something of a modern marvel – it turned out director Sean Baker had shot the entire film on three iPhone 5S handsets. He wasn’t the first to swap cameras for smartphones, but he was certainly the most innovative. With only a handful of accessories – an anamorphic lens, Steadicam, and $8 app called Filmic Pro – he still found a way to capture the city in all its sensuous, chaotic glory. In post-production, he ignored social-realism’s love of muted colours and turned his LA into a sun-baked terrarium. When orange came to dominate the colour palette, the film’s title was born.

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