Tan­ger­ine

Sean Baker’s fifth fea­ture film opens on two trans­gen­der sex work­ers shar­ing a dough­nut on the morn­ing of Christ­mas Eve in a shop on the inter­sec­tion of San­ta Mon­i­ca and High­land in LA. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly judged moment that intro­duces these tem­pes­tu­ous char­ac­ters in an inti­mate and ener­getic man­ner as they gos­sip and talk about their love lives.

It is also the calm before the storm, with Alexan­dra (Mya Tay­lor) acci­den­tal­ly reveal­ing to her best friend Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) that her boyfriend and pimp Chester (one of Baker’s reg­u­lar play­ers James Ran­sone) has been cheat­ing on her with a white girl. Crazed with jeal­ousy, Sin-Dee goes on a ram­page across town in search of Chester and the mys­tery woman and in doing so deliv­ers glo­ri­ous­ly in-your-face moments of pure delight.

The char­ac­ters talk trash with as much bite as Nic­ki Minaj, defi­ant­ly spit­ting in the face of good taste. Lines like, ​“You didn’t have to Chris Brown the girl!” zing from the mouths of Tay­lor and Rodriguez, pro­vid­ing unadul­ter­at­ed joy in the process. There are shades of John Waters-style debauch­ery at times and it’s all the more enjoy­able for it, but it is also sin­cere, unguard­ed and feels lived in.

Like Jen­nie Livingston’s New York-set doc­u­men­tary about the art of Vogue­ing, Paris Is Burn­ing, it bris­tles with an ani­mat­ed ener­gy but is also root­ed in real­i­ty. Mya lives close by to the neigh­bour­hood where the film is shot and told Bak­er sto­ries about the ille­gal activ­i­ty in the area and Kiki was a trans men­tor. They are both trans­gen­der people.

Much has been made of the fact that Bak­er shot his film on three iPhone 5s, using a clip on anamor­phic lens – an impres­sive feat con­sid­er­ing how gor­geous the final prod­uct is. Bak­er glides his cam­era across the sun-smeared vista of Hol­ly­wood at Christ­mas time, turn­ing the grime and dust into some­thing spark­ly and won­drous. And as seen in his pre­vi­ous work, Bak­er has a way of direct­ing his actors that gets the best out of them. He ekes every last ounce of com­e­dy and dra­mat­ic val­ue out of their phys­i­cal per­for­mances using the superb sound­track to par­al­lel emotion.

A venge­ful Sin-Dee struts along to aggres­sive Jer­sey Club anthems and the next moment Alexan­dra regales her colour­ful voy­age to Beethoven’s ​‘Cori­olan Over­ture’ while prepar­ing for a fes­tive blow job in a car wash. There are bursts of intense bru­tal­i­ty but ulti­mate­ly this a vibrant and often hilar­i­ous slice of life ground­ed by a friend­ship formed on the streets.

There’s no preach­ing and there’s no big moral con­clu­sion, this is sim­ply a well-craft­ed sto­ry penned by Bak­er and co-writer Chris Bergoch and fea­tur­ing two leads who whip up deli­cious moments of fren­zy and melan­choly that res­onate deeply as they hur­tle across the fin­ish line to a claus­tro­pho­bic and con­fronta­tion­al cli­max. There’s so much screech­ing melo­dra­ma crammed in to its 88-minute run­time that it feels like it’s over as quick­ly as it start­ed. Tan­ger­ine is an exam­ple of low-bud­get film­mak­ing at its best, and it exists as liv­ing proof that there is real­ly no excuse to not be mak­ing movies if you’ve got a smart­phone in your pocket.