Tangerine

TANGERINE (15)

D: Sean Baker

Magnolia/Duplass Brothers/Through Films (Sean Baker, Karrie Cox, Marcus Cox, Darren Dean & Shih-Ching Tsou)

US 2015

88 mins

Drama

W: Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch

DP: Sean Baker & Radium Cheung

Ed: Sean Baker

Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Sin-Dee), Mya Taylor (Alexandra), James Ransone (Chester), Mickey O'Hagan (Dinah), Karren Karagulian (Razmik)

Filmed entirely using an iPhone app (FiLMIC pro) on a modest budget of $100,000, Tangerine follows two transsexual prostitutes as they try to reunite with their pimp, whom one of them is in a relationship with.

The rest of the film is padded out with taxi cab confessions and other various characters, and though there is some good dialogue and the characters are reasonably well fleshed out, it's just a little too experimental for conventional tastes.

As a short film, this may have worked a lot better, although it did present Sean Baker with his breakthrough, which he followed up with the quite excellent The Florida Project (qv) in 2017.

6/10