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Sundance 2015 review: Tangerine - juicy LA sex trade tale literally

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  • Sundance 2015 review: Tangerine - juicy LA sex trade tale literally

    Sundance 2015 review: Tangerine - juicy LA sex trade tale literally iPhone'd in

    4/5stars

    Three smartphones were the tech used to capture this lively yuletide
    story of a pimp, a meth-head and two transgender prostitutes in
    modern-day Los Angeles

    Room with a view ... Tangerine

    Sunday 25 January 2015 14.11 GMT


    Of all the many accomplishments of Sean Baker's Tangerine, the most
    arresting is the fact it was shot using just three iPhone 5s phones,
    meaning permits weren't required. That means Tangerine shows a side of
    Los Angles rarely captured on film - or, well, whatever the thing is
    inside an iPhone 5s that records video.

    We meet transgender prostitute Sin-Dee (Kiki Kitanna Rodriguez) on
    Christmas Eve as she hunts across the city looking for her pimp
    boyfriend (James Ransone) and the meth addict (Mickey O'Hagan) that he
    has been sleeping with. She's followed by fellow sex worker Alexandra
    (Mya Taylor) and their stories intersect with Razmik (Karren
    Karagulian), an Armenian cab driver with a crush on Sin-Dee and
    others.

    When the film starts with a rollicking soundtrack on the sun-blistered
    streets ofLos Angeles, it's like nothing you've seen before. The
    colours and the sun are so bright and dazzling they blot out the grit
    everywhere but in the people stalking the sidewalks. Using mostly
    first time actors, Baker achieves both highly stylized shooting and
    authenticity simultaneously. Everyone is moving, moving, moving trying
    to accomplish some goal. "There is nothing out here but the hustle,"
    Alexandra tells us. If anything, that is the moral of the movie.

    But as the sun goes down, the action slows and the cinematography and
    music follow pace. There is still plenty of drama, but the film
    becomes a bit more conventional and even sags in places.

    On the whole, though, it is real and visceral, maintaining a pace
    almost too hectic to sustain. After a borderline unbelievable
    showdown, where all the stories converge in a fluorescent-lit Donut
    Time, Tangerine ends pretty much where it began, with Sin-Dee and
    Alexandra unsure what to do with themselves, as if there is no point.
    But getting to see lives like these - not just transgender hookers,
    but cab drives, drug addicts, beat cops, fast food workers, and the
    people who are struggling on the fringes of society - creates the kind
    of movie that we don't see very often. The iPhone 5s becomes nothing
    more than a style choice, one that is daring but entirely
    inconsequential to the bigger picture.


    http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/25/sundance-2015-review-tangerine-iphone-film-movie

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