Tangerine

Sean Baker has become one of my favorite new directors.  He is among the few to emerge who supplants deeply human narratives with a strong visual sense. Often one or the other suffers.  His influences are quite diverse, evidenced onscreen in his work and in his Letterboxd diary (check it out, please), in which he sometimes offers opinions on films as diverse as THE KNACK, AND HOW TO GET IT and THE SOLDIER.  He is not so concerned with plot, much as Cassavettes wasn't.  Characters, atmosphere and locations and their use are what truly make great cinema, in my opinion.  One that happily seems to be shared by Baker.

How characters interact, too.  Sin-Dee and Alexandra are about as sad and fascinating as characters I've seen recently, but underneath the cat fights and hard feelings, they love each other.  It can be seen in big and small gestures, or intuited by their body language.  We spend much of 2015's TANGERINE watching them bicker with and console the other.  Life is harsh as a transgender prostitute in West Hollywood.   The story involves Sin-Dee's (who's just served a month in prison) efforts to track down her boyfriend/pimp, Chester, who has not been faithful.  It's Christmas Eve.

We meet many WeHo characters.  Baker gives time to an Armenian cab driver named Razmik who has a wife and child but also likes to be serviced by the title characters.  There's Dinah, the straight, white prostitute who is hunted down in a hotel room brothel and dragged across town by Sin-Dee toward the local hangout, a donut shop where Chester conducts business.  It is there where the film's eventful climax will take place, one that is funny and pathetic and horrifying.

TANGERINE as a whole can be described that way as well.  Baker never flinches at real life, the way desperate folks talk and act.  THE FLORIDA PROJECT was my first exposure to the writer/director, and I was highly impressed with it for the same reasons.  No one is deemed a freak, or abnormal.  Though definitely portrayed as outsiders.   Baker never judges his characters or gives them an out, a dramatic force majeure, if you will.  He creates more than just shadows of real people; he often casts those who've been there and don't have to fake that tired, defeated look in their eyes.  This is the best sort of cinema verite.

Much was made of TANGERINE's filming via a trio of iPhones.  Essentially, to me at least, this is a gimmick that will hopefully not go mainstream.  Though, Baker and later Soderbergh did well with this technique and their movies look good.  Baker is such an imaginative director that any format he chose would reveal his creativity and mastery.