• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • NEWS+OPINIONS
    • NEWS TO US
    • COLUMNS
      • APPARENT HORIZON
      • DEAR READER
      • Close
    • LONGFORM FEATURES
    • OPINIONS
    • EDITORIAL
    • Close
  • ARTS+ENTERTAINMENT
    • FILM
    • MUSIC
    • COMEDY
    • PERFORMING ARTS
    • VISUAL ARTS
    • Close
  • DINING+DRINKING
    • EATS
    • SIPS
    • Close
  • LIFESTYLE
    • CANNABIS
      • TALKING JOINTS MEMO
      • Close
    • WELLNESS
    • GTFO
    • Close
  • STUFF TO DO
  • TICKETS
  • ABOUT US
    • ABOUT
    • MASTHEAD
    • ADVERTISE
    • PRIVACY POLICY
    • Close
  • BECOME A MEMBER

Dig Bos

The Dig - Boston's Only Newspaper

CURRENT STREET EDITION

DIG 23.05 – 4/8/21

LA PLAYS ITSELF: ON THE COMEDIC ETHNOGRAPHY OF “TANGERINE”

Written by JAKE MULLIGAN Posted July 17, 2015 Filed Under: A+E, Film

FM_Tangerine_728

When Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez)—the pre-op transgender prostitute featured in Sean Baker’s Tangerine—stomps furiously over the Hollywood Walk of Fame, en route to a showdown with her boyfriend-slash-pimp, the subtext of the moment is hardly subtle. Baker’s farcical film, which takes place across the day and night of a white-hot LA Christmas Eve, has two primary subjects: Hollywood, and genitals. The idea being that the movies we watch lie about both topics far too often.

 

“Yeah, like a real bitch,” Sin-Dee’s friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) tells her about Dinah, who Chester—the aforementioned pimp—has started sleeping with. “With a vagina and everything.” Sin-Dee just got out after a month-long incarceration, and hearing that Chester has spent all that time with “fish” (cisgender women) sends her even further over the edge than the crack pipe she’ll be hitting later on. She sets out, between tricks, to find that “real bitch,” planning to catch Chester red-handed: She’s going to drop the woman’s beat-up body in front of him the moment he starts claiming fidelity, as coal for his Christmas.

 

So Sin-Dee sets off on her journey down Santa Monica Blvd., with a borrowed cigarette in one hand and the other clenched into a closed fist. Ask yourself: when was the last time you watched a movie and knew, from the film itself, what street the characters were on? There’s specificity to Baker’s film—regional specificity, lingual specificity, anatomical specificity. And much of the dialogue revolves around the way these various identities (trans or cis, straight or gay, black or white, worker or customer) negotiate with one another; first figuratively, and then literally: a prostitute prodding a trick to see how much she can make from the information he wants, or a shop owner threatening a 911 call so that Chester—whose pimping the woman abides without complaint—will keep his voice at a level that won’t disturb other customers. These are tiny textural details, but together they form an image the size of a tapestry.

 

One of those johns is Razmik (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian taxi driver—married to a cisgender woman—who often stops the meter so he can orally service Sin-Dee and her colleagues. (In one of the funniest scenes the movies have seen in years, he accidentally picks up a cisgender prostitute, and experiences something best described as “straight panic.”) Before Razmik’s path intersects with the film’s gaggle of sex workers, Baker edits in clips of his passengers: a young woman with dyed hair and a Hello Kitty phone case taking selfies, or two eye-nodding bar-hopping guys rolling their way to unconsciousness. In most films such cross-cutting—which continues, from Sin-Dee to Alexandra to Razmik, in circles—would be extraneous. But in Tangerine it’s integral detail. Like the negotiations everyone enters into so haphazardly, these sequences are ethnography as comedy.

 

Baker’s camera rushes through the streets behind Sin-Dee with the force of a homing missile. But his compositions also highlight places alongside people. Commercial plazas, food trucks, car washes, and even the occasional chain store make cameos. And what emerges is a document of the Hollywood that Hollywood declines to show us. Tangerine becomes a critique of surfaces themselves: The LA we know from movies and TV, revealed to be as false as the idea that anatomy dictates gender.

 

One of the last locations we end up at is Donut Time, which doubles as Chester’s office during his hours of operation. Everyone in the narrative—Sin-Dee, Chester, Alexandra, Dinah, Razmik, his family, and the shop owner, for starters—converges on the spot for a screaming match that has your eyes crossing in six different directions trying to follow it all. It’s a conflict befitting a screwball comedy. But Baker isn’t rejecting that Hollywood tradition—he’s reclaiming it. His comedy-of-remarriage contains the markers of life that the filmmaking industry exists to erase. Tangerine re-inserts them: the lower-class hang-outs, the mom-and-pop pizza places, the run-down taco stands, the penises, the vaginas. It takes Hollywood—the town and its products—and fucks it.

 

TANGERINE. RATED R. OPENS FRI 6.17. KENDALL SQUARE CINEMA, 355 BINNEY ST., CAMBRIDGE.

JAKE MULLIGAN
More from author
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    INTERVIEW: SHATARA MICHELLE FORD, WRITER/DIRECTOR OF "TEST PATTERN"
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    FILM REVIEW: "ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE"
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    IN MEMORIAM: JOAN MICKLIN SILVER
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    FILM REVIEW: "ON THE ROCKS"

Filed Under: A+E, Film Tagged With: cisgender, donut time, Hollywood, Karren Karagulian, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Los Angeles, Prostitution, Sin-Dee Rella, tangerine, transgender

WHAT’S NEW

A SHORT DOC ABOUT HOW DIGBOSTON WEATHERED A PANDEMIC YEAR

A SHORT DOC ABOUT HOW DIGBOSTON WEATHERED A PANDEMIC YEAR

FULL PARKING ENFORCEMENT RETURNS TO BOSTON, BLUEBIKES STILL AVAIL FOR ESSENTIAL WORKERS

FULL PARKING ENFORCEMENT RETURNS TO BOSTON, BLUEBIKES STILL AVAIL FOR ESSENTIAL WORKERS

EMERGENCY PRESS CONFERENCE AND RALLY FOR DAUNTE WRIGHT

EMERGENCY PRESS CONFERENCE AND RALLY FOR DAUNTE WRIGHT

POLITICIANS GET IN LINE TO CALL FOR BOSTON POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

POLITICIANS GET IN LINE TO CALL FOR BOSTON POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

PARENTS RELEASE AN ANALYSIS OF BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDRAISING INEQUITIES

PARENTS RELEASE AN ANALYSIS OF BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDRAISING INEQUITIES

IF YOU’RE SURPRISED THE BPD CODDLED AN ACCUSED MOLESTER COP, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

IF YOU’RE SURPRISED THE BPD CODDLED AN ACCUSED MOLESTER COP, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

Primary Sidebar

HEMPIRE FREEDOM PACK 25% OFF

FEATURED EVENT

Most Popular

  • VACCINE EQUITY NOW! COALITION ASKS BAKER TO ALLOCATE 20% OF NEW DOSES TO HARD HIT COMMUNITIES by SHIRA LAUCHAROEN
  • rally to protest discrimination and crimes against Asian and Pacific islanders during Stop Asian Hate rally on Boston Common in Boston PICS & RECAP: “STOP ASIAN HATE BOSTON” RALLY ON THE COMMON by KEIKO HIROMI
  • IF YOU’RE SURPRISED THE BPD CODDLED AN ACCUSED MOLESTER COP, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION by CHRIS FARAONE
  • A FAREWELL TRIBUTE (OF SORTS) TO MARTY WALSH by DIG STAFF
  • THE MYSTERY OF CHEZ TORTONI by CHRISTOPHER EHLERS

READ CURRENT MEMBER EDITION

DIG Member 2.1 – March 2021

READ CURRENT STREET ISSUE

DIG 23.05 – 4/8/21

Footer

digbos

digbos
“My administration is doubling down on our work “My administration is doubling down on our work to stand up the #Boston Office of #Police Accountability and Transparency.” https://digboston.com/politicians-get-in-line-to-call-for-boston-police-accountability/ #politics #Massachusetts
This week is your last chance to hit up Mooby’s This week is your last chance to hit up Mooby’s in #Boston … https://digboston.com/moobys-boston-how-kevin-smith-has-brought-his-pick-up-experience-to-10-cities-during-the-pandemic/ #fan #popup #fun #restaurant #movie #Massachusetts #snoochieboochies
The group is asking that polices address the dispa The group is asking that polices address the disparities the #data has revealed. https://digboston.com/parents-release-an-analysis-of-boston-public-school-fundraising-inequities/ #education #school #public #study #fundraising #racism #Boston #Massachusetts
“We’re not going to survive for 20 more years “We’re not going to survive for 20 more years if we don’t do this [move to a bigger space].” https://digboston.com/how-juliet-hit-a-100k-kickstarter-goal-in-4-days/ #restaurant #business #food #crowdfund #SomervilleMA #coronavirus #COVID19
EDITORIAL: DIGBOSTON SEEKS CLIMATE IDEAS FOR MAYOR EDITORIAL: DIGBOSTON SEEKS CLIMATE IDEAS FOR MAYOR KIM JANEY. Environmental organizations and individual activists invited to submit opinion articles for publication. https://digboston.com/editorial-digboston-seeks-climate-ideas-for-mayor-kim-janey/ #politics @boston_mayor #environment #globalwarming #climate #activist #callforsubmissions #policy #Boston #Massachusetts
“Most are some of my favorite bars or local clas “Most are some of my favorite bars or local classics that I’ve learned to love in my time living in the city. Others just have a great facade that I know would make a great drawing.” https://digboston.com/drawn-but-not-forgotten-local-artist-sketches-beloved-boston-restaurants/ #art #artist #sketch #drawing #Boston #Massachusetts #bar #restaurant
Despite #pandemic hurdles, Mass #music instructors Despite #pandemic hurdles, Mass #music instructors hit new high notes. “My #teaching has gone to another level.” https://digboston.com/the-medium-is-the-maestro/ #education #Massachusetts #coronavirus #COVID19
From the podcast to the book, Wayne Federman chron From the podcast to the book, Wayne Federman chronicles the business of joke-telling. https://digboston.com/the-history-of-stand-up-from-mark-twain-to-dave-chappelle/ #comedy #history #book #interview #Boston #Massachusetts
“I’m calling on some of you to drop by a local “I’m calling on some of you to drop by a local field office and hear what people have to say.” https://digboston.com/dear-reader-the-political-season-is-upon-us-embrace-it/ #politics #commentary #election #Massachusetts
“I think most people agree that we want our publ “I think most people agree that we want our public dollars to go to those companies that are not cutting corners.” https://digboston.com/bill-seeks-to-penalize-contractors-for-unsafe-conditions/ #politics #legislation #construction #safety #labor #Massachusetts
Load More... Follow on Instagram
Social Buttons

DigBoston facebook DigBoston Twitter DigBoston Instagram

Masthead

About

Submissions

Advertise

Privacy Policy

Customer Service

Distribution

About Us

DigBoston is a one-stop nexus for everything worth doing or knowing in the Boston area. It's an alt-weekly, it's a website, it's an e-mail blast, it's a twitter account, it's that cool party that you were at last night ... hey, you're reading it, so it's gotta be good. For advertising inquiries: [email protected] To reach Editorial: [email protected] For internship opportunities: [email protected]