Tangerine

Judd: New to video on demand is Sundance Film Festival darling Tangerine, the story of two transexual prostitutes, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, who spend the day wandering the streets of Los Angeles in search of the cis-gendered female who had sex with Sin-Dee’s pimp/boyfriend while she was in jail for 28 days. Written and directed by Sean Baker, known for Greg the Bunny, Tangerine is a ultra low budget indie comedy shot entirely on an iPhone. While there is no question that Tangerine is low budget, the descriptor “comedy” is a stretch.

Billed as the first movie shot on an iPhone — while technically true, 2011’s Olive was the first feature length movie shot on an HD smartphone —there is plenty to admire about Tangerine. While it doesn’t have the same visual effect that grainy, gritty, low-end film used back in my day provided, using a small digital lens to film a movie adds a new, slicker yet equally gritty look and feel to the movie. The movie feels raw, and in a time when aspiring filmmakers have access to so much software to add polish to their end product, a movie that avoids that — intentionally or financially — feels fresh.

How they bill this as a comedy is anybody’s guess. The movie spends a full hour of it’s one hour, 27 minute runtime, tracking Sin-Dee as she storms through the streets of LA, demanding to find her pimp/boyfriend Chester, and “that real fish he been fuckin’ ” while Alexandra tags along handing out flyers for her show at a local club. None of it is particularly funny, and most of it is just plain mean. I know witty banter and bon mots would go against them being uneducated street trade, but the script felt like it was written by someone trying to be funny, but comes across as an asshole.

I think the emotional heft that seems to have charmed the Sundance elite came from the fact that the movie treats Sin-Dee and Alexandra as neither diamond-in-the-rough Pretty Women, nor trans, junky whores, with nothing to live for. Yes, there was drug use, and the film’s ending dissolves into a tense, but extremely realistic situation regarding one of Alexandra’s Johns, his wife and his mother-in-law, but throughout it all the girls come across as real (real obnoxious), not glamorous or pitiful; at the end of the day, these girls still have hope for a better life.

The question comes down to whom would I recommend Tangerine. I think it has it’s merits, for certain. I think it’s fantastic that there is finally a movie about two trans prostitutes that aren’t dealing with addiction or AIDS. Tangerine is moving gay film into new territory that is long overdue. Unfortunately, I also think the script has very little substance, and what substance it has comes too late. Tangerine is for hardcore fans of indie and queer cinema. But I have a sincere hope that it triggers a renaissance of LGBT films where we’re finally seen as people who are more than tragic victims or heroic survivors, facing problems that are larger, or better yet, more petty than coming out, HIV and addiction.

Judd: 2 ½ stars