![]() ![]() Electrifying as Rodriguez is, the film’s most memorable performance is Taylor’s. A bathroom exchange between Sin-Dee and Dinah, and a genuinely moving conclusion in a laundromat, are like oases in a furnace. Rodriguez’s performance – alternately little-girl charming and dangerously volatile – is a human fireworks display, interspersed with moments of eerie calm. ![]() The film’s tone is a delicate balance, and it relies almost entirely on the complementary energies of Rodriguez and Taylor, who hold the centre of a narrative that starts at 100 m.p.h. life on the edge of destitution – including a visit to what must surely be the most convincing crack den ever captured on film. The thrill of Tangerine is, in fact, the way it combines farcical momentum with an utterly persuasive portrait of L.A. However, Baker has more than sociology on his mind, and Razmik’s life eventually intersects with those of Si-Dee, Alexandra, Dinah and Chester in a climactic act of pure, delirious farce. This strand of the film bears a certain similarity to Jafar Panahi’s current documentary Taxi Tehran, in which a cab is also used to capture a cross-section of urban life. Unfolding in tandem to Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s misadventures is the daily grind of Armenian taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian), whose fares (including B-movie veteran Clu Gulager) form a microcosm of L.A. Christmas that is notably lacking in good will to all. As if all this wasn’t festive enough, the events transpire on Christmas Eve – albeit a sun-throbbed and neon-lit L.A. While Alexandra focuses on the hustle of making a living and preparing for her debut nightclub performance, Sin-Dee kidnaps Chester’s other woman, Dinah (the terrific Mickey O’Hagan), and marches her through the city for a showdown with Chester at his business headquarters in a donut shop. The lightning-paced plot follows Sin-Dee (Rodriguez), recently released from prison and ‘going hard’ on a mission of revenge after her best friend Alexandra (Taylor) inadvertently reveals the cheating ways of Sin-Dee’s boyfriend/pimp, Chester (another sly turn from Baker veteran James Ransome). The film’s shooting gimmick is an attention-grabber on paper, but on screen it’s quickly forgotten, thanks to the hilarious, riveting performances of the leads, first-time actresses Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor. Sean Baker follows up his tart but tender-hearted off-Hollywood vignette Starlet (2012) with something even zestier in Tangerine – a ‘transgender revenge comedy’ shot in down-at-heel LA using only iPhones fitted with anamorphic lenses. Highly recommended.Starring Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karren Karagulian, Mickey O’Hagan, James Ransome. It exudes a terrific, urgent energy that elevates it far beyond its grubby milieu into a handsome and touching portrait of human beings struggling to stay afloat. ![]() The film has the guerrilla feel of observational cinema, caught on the fly, but there is real artifice at work: the editing, by turns choppy and fluid, is a marvel of precision, cutting back and forth between the storylines in what seems close to real time. It sounds like a hideously seedy affair (heed the censor's rating) but miraculously Baker finds in these lives of not-so-quiet desperation a transcendent and deeply moving humanity. Sin-Dee tracks the woman, Dinah (O'Hagan), to a dingy motel, part crack-den, part brothel, and drags her (literally) around the neighbourhood on an expletive-fuelled odyssey that intersects with the lives of fellow trannie Alexandra (Taylor) and Razmik (Karagulian), an Armenian taxi driver who is by no means as dispassionate an observer of the goings-on as he at first appears to be.
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