christmas in
los angeles
by Douglas Messerli
Sean Baker
and Chris Geroch (writers), Sean Baker (director) Tangerine / 2015
Two transgender friends, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki
Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are sharing a donut at Donut Time, unable
to afford anything else, as the conversation turns to Sin-Dee’s boyfriend
Chester. Having just been released from prison, Sin-Dee is about to announce
that she and Chester are soon to be married, but her confidant Alexandra
mistakes the turn in the conversation as being a declaration that their
relationship is over and expresses relief that Sin-Dee is dumping the man who,
in her friend’s absence, has been having an affair with a white girl—who, even
worse, is actually a woman! Moments later Sin-Dee, after recognizing what her
friend has just expressed, Sin-Dee is transformed from a slightly exaggerated
figure of the street into a towering Medea, out for revenge, while the
movie—filmed amazingly on an Anamorphic widescreen attachment to an iPhone—goes
into overdrive, speeding up the action as Sin-Dee, briefly abandoned by
Alexandra for her drama-queen tactics, goes on the hunt.
Within the span of about an hour and a
half, Sin-Dee swoops down upon the city with a nearly supernatural force that
makes the grandest diva seem like a cheerleading choir singer. Alexandra,
slowly traipsing behind her friend in an attempt to bring some sobriety to the
whole affair, is herself stalked by ghosts of the world in which she lives while
attempting to keep “it together” as she passes out postcard sized Xeroxed
invitations to an event at which she plans to sing that night in a West
Hollywood bar.
If these two represent a community most
Americans might never have before imagined, we gradually are so fascinated—and,
secondarily, appalled by their actions and the world in which they exist that, particularly
given the intense Techni-colorization of the LA landscape—we simply cannot
resist watching.
Those of us who live in Los Angeles are
used to the vast ranges in color of golden yellow landscape of “winter”
afternoons as the light sinks into a sky of striped pink, purples, blues, and
slate greens before the magical electrified landscape lights itself up for the
night; but outsiders will surely not believe what they see. The landscape is
naturally as exaggerated as the always “dramatic” characters and the world they
inhabit. Day and night, we soon perceive, for these female-male prostitutes (a
hybrid species as sweet and sour as the mandarin orange found in Tangiers now
called a Tangerine) live lives of “drama” without a break, madly loving and
hating the world around them while they seek out moments of self-expression and
wonderment in the interstices of their boisterous actions. But in those
moments, as this movie goes marching forward into nearly manic force, there is
little time even to catch a breath.
With hound-dog desperation Sin-Dee manages
to track down her sexual competitor through bus, subway, and taxi rides that
take her from the outskirts of West Hollywood all the way to center city
transient motels, seeking out the girl Chester has purportedly been fucking,
with only the suggestion being that her name begins with a “D.” No poet could
possibly be as devoted to a single explication of a sound of a letter than she,
discovering her Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan) in one of the worst flop house motels
one might have imagined, with the ugly male clients grope their prostitutes in
any possible space the rooms permit: bathrooms, showers, and closets.
Dinah, it turns out, is a fairly ignorant
southern hillbilly who, in her squealing pain of injustice is hardly able to
speak; but Sin-Dee refuses to be calmed as she brutally pulls, punches, slaps,
and drags the poor girl through the streets back into her own territory just
south of what tourists describe as Hollywood!
Meanwhile, Alexandra makes her way
through the same streets, picked up by a cheap and abusive white client
determined that she help him in “just getting off.” When he can’t even get an
erection, she attempts to escape with her prepaid cash, while he, in turn,
grabs back the money, while she attempts to steal his car keys, the scuffle
ending up in an embarrassing encounter with the local police who force both
what they perceive as the losers into a stand-off.
Another, equally important plot line
tracks a married Armenian taxi driver through his day, as he encounters a near
dying American Indian named Mia and two drunken, retching party-goers who turn
his taxi into a stinky vessel of other rider’s disdain. But what becomes even
more startling is that this father and breadwinner, Razmik (Karren Karagulian),
has a thing about transgender prostitutes: his preference, as a gynandromorphophile,
being to suck off their cocks
For most moviegoers, I am sure, what I
have just told you might dissuade you from seeing this film. But the fact is,
if you can get over your amazement that such people, behaving so different from
most of society, exist, you cannot help but perceive them as loveable, if
troublingly disturbed beings who, as the movie progresses, are destined to
farcically come together in ways that only someone like Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar might have imagined.
Gradually this Los Angeles “on the road”
spectacle settles down into a comical-tragic conclusion as Sin-Dee, with her
tortured girl in hand, determines to attend Alexandra’s singing premiere—an
event to which nobody else has bothered to show up.
Dinah, suddenly, reveals she has a secret
weapon, drugs, which Sin-Dee, pipe in hand, cannot resist, and the two suddenly
bond at the very moment that Alexandra is attempting to make her impossible
claim for fame. Her terribly sad and touching performance of Victor Herbert’s
“Toyland” will certainly put tears in your eyes, even if the previously violent
events did not make you perceive the utter desperation of these figures. The
fact that Alexandra has had to pay for her own failed premiere, makes it clearer
yet that these women of the streets have nowhere to go—not only to sleep
through the night, but in their own imaginations.
Determined to drag Dinah back to her
cheating Chester, Sin-Dee returns to the pimp’s nightly office, Donut Time, at
the same moment that the Armenian taxi driver—having left his wife in
mother-in-law, in the midst of a family cultural celebration—arrives to declare
his desire for Sin-Dee.
The arrival in this sudden hot spot of
Raznik’s mother-in-law, and, soon after, his wife, child at breast, is
obviously a bit too much to believe, and almost topples the film into a kind of
absurdly implausible melt-down, as everybody, betrayed by everyone else in this
topsy-turvy universe, is forced to realize and encounter realities outside of
their comprehensions.
If Chester finally convinces Sin-Dee of
his love and commitment, the sudden revelation that he has also had a brief
sexual encounter with Alexandra, shatters the theatrical semblance of reality.
Razmik’s hunger for transgender cock similarly creates an incomprehensible
barrier between husband, wife, and mother. This crazy, vital, nasty reality
seems ready to collapse, and for a long few moments, it appears that all of the
characters, Raznik, his wife, his mother-in-law, Sin-Dee, Alexandra, and, most
painfully, the totally unwanted Dinah, must come to terms with the realities of
their lives: that they are all figures who nobody can truly love.
Troubled by Sin-Dee’s response to her
betrayal, Alexandra alone trails after her, attempting, quite lamely and
ineffectively, to apologize to no effect. When Sin-Dee meets up with a
potential client, she pushes Alexandra off; at least she might bring in some
money before the end of this long day.
As she approaches the car, bigoted youths
toss hot coffee into her face in mockery, drenching her clothes and wig, the
most important elements of her female identity. Alexandra comes rushing
forward, dragging her resistant friend into a laundromat, demanding she give up
nearly all the external elements of her identity and desired beauty so that
they might be cleaned. The abandonment of her wig is the most devastating
subtraction. As the two sit in pain waiting for the washers to complete their
spin, Alexandra, in a gesture so graceful and magnanimous that we are stunned,
offers the now hairless Sin-Dee her own long straight locks. But in that very
act, for the first time, we truly perceive Alexandra’s saintly dome, blessing
her with a beauty that her wig could only hide.
Did I forget to mention, this all happens
on Christmas Eve? Nowhere else could such a lovingly outré tale be told as a
Christmas story but in Los Angeles, a world where all the simple myths of snow,
crèche, and cathedral have absolutely no significance. But yes, I will now
watch it every Christmas as a true significance of Christ’s birth.
Despite….well it isn’t even despite any longer: these figures, so very
separated from human kindness, have discovered how to love in way that
resonates with a deeper humanity than many of those sitting in their cozy,
ordinary homes.
Los Angeles, July 17, 2015
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2015).
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