Tangerine

To the list of Great American Christmas Eve romantic comedies now must be added Sean Baker’s brilliant Tangerine.

“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped up lie,” the Armenian immigrant tells the cabbie she’s hired to catch her cabbie son-in-law in flagrante delicto. This film explores the underbelly of LA life, not the usual yule flick sentimentality. 

The film opens and closes on two best friends, who happen to be transvestite prostitutes. Sin-Dee is fresh out of jail, having taken a possession rap for her pimp Chester. She buys friend Alexandra a (sprinkled) donut for Christmas and is about to announce her engagement to Chester when Alexandra blurts out his infidelity. 

The narrative intercuts three storylines. The main is Sin-Dee’s quest to track down Chester and his new girlfriend Dinah. Alexandra agrees to accompany her, on Sin-Dee’s pledge not to get dramatic. Alexandra is also promoting her singing gig that night at a bar, where she performs a very touching rendition of Toyland, a Christmas Eve metaphor — like the film’s seasonal fruit title — that is turned to express the growth away from childhood, simplicity and illusions. Of all her friends, only Sin-Dee — dragging along the unwilling Dinah — makes the performance. All the sadder then Chester’s revelation that in Sin-Dee’s absence he’d not only banged Dinah but Alexandra (once) too. 

The third plot follows Armenian cabbie Razmik. He suffers the rigours of his job, including vomiting drunks and a garrulous old man irked by having a woman’s name (veteran Clu Gallagher).  At home Razmik has a pretty young wife, baby girl, dog — and an Old World mother-in-law intent upon destroying the marriage. He finds his own release in going down on transvestite prostitutes, where he can satisfy his homosexual needs under cover of the feminine. He rejects a prostitute when he finds she’s a woman. Even in free America he’s forced to be furtive.

The Armenian cabbie and the trannies share their exclusion from mainstream America, struggling to make a living by servicing the legitimate society. The prosaic cabbie seems drawn to the trannies’ exotica. The film focuses on these fascinating characters, with their colourful, often indecipherable language.
     El Lay is defined by dark streets, active alleys, and colourful signs that suggest this most iconic of American cities has to be read in isolated phrases, not passed through as blithely as mainstream films have accustomed us. All the central figures grab our sympathy, if not all our identification, but the more we see them the more easily our judgmental reflexes slip aside.  We’re in Paul Morrissey country here, where irregular characters struggle to sustain their self-respect and forge genuine relationships.

We’re so drawn into these characters’ world that it comes as a shock when their bubble is broken by a car of larking boys. The real world, the outside LA, intrudes in the form of lads luring Sin-Dee to their window, then dumping a mess of urine on her face and clothes. The girls’ broken friendship resumes in the laundromat as Alexandra helps both to clean Sin-Dee and  to recover her dignity. As the dryer whirrs behind the credits this film asserts the dignity of the LA underclass, usually omitted from your perhaps more traditional Christmas fare.

     Astonishingly, this film was entirely shot on a cell-phone with adaptive lens. Astonishing. Not a line rings false, not a shot falls dull, not a scene but that finds and warms our uncommonly common humanity.