Tangerine takes you to places you don’t want to go with people you’d rather not be around—and it’s one of the funniest movies of the year.
It beautifies nothing. Not its sleazy Los Angeles sidewalks. Not its pimps and johns and addicts and hookers (these hookers are the type of girls who need to wax their faces and chests regularly, if you get my drift). Not their rage or their failures or their poverty. Under the simple light of fluorescent fixtures, street lamps and the sun, filmmaker Sean Baker seems less like a director here and more like an eavesdropper. His camera chases these characters around the city as they argue, have mental breakdowns, make awesomely stinging wisecracks and do business in alleys, fast food joints, ravaged motels, late night donut shops and car washes (where the film’s wittiest sex scene is set; all we see is the automatic machine splashing, slapping and blowing against the windshield, but it becomes suggestive when we know of the unseen fluid exchange that’s happening in the car at the same time).
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez is the hothead who pulls the movie forward as she literally pulls across several blocks the girl whom she just KNOWS fucked her pimp boyfriend while she was away from him in jail for twenty-eight days missing her wig and make-up. Rodriguez is a chick with a dick and not a passive bone in her body. She’s grating at first, but she grows on us as we see life kick her around. Her best friend is Mya Taylor, who’s a little more sane because she has a dream beyond the streets, even if the only place that dream has taken her so far is paying the owner of a dive bar to let her sing torch songs to an audience of seven people. I still wouldn’t cross her, though.
This is a film that feels exciting and new, shot with an iPhone and diving deep into an underworld that’s rarely presented in such raw style, a fevered transmission straight from the streets, but its heart is touchingly old-fashioned. The meat of the story are the oldest topics in the world: loneliness, jealousy and friendship. Also, Baker understands one of the most elusive rules of comedy, which is that jerks are always funnier than nice people. Our heartiest laughs come when we give in to our dark side and enjoy an insult or someone else’s pratfall. This film leaves that door to the dark side wide open. Also, the whole story is set on Christmas Eve (in the warm California sun), which essentially makes this a Christmas movie, the only one I know of with a scene where a transsexual hooker plays with a guy’s balls for $40 while he tries to jerk off in a parked Passat. This should go down as a classic of the genre. Double-feature it with It’s a Wonderful Life this December. For real.