Tangerine (2015)
There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes into Tangerine, where it dawns on you that you are watching something genuinely alive. Not polished, not composed for maximum effect, but actually alive, with all the noise and heat and mess that implies. And then you remember it was shot on a couple of iPhones, and it stops seeming like a quirk and starts seeming like the whole point.
Sean Baker made this on a shoestring, guerrilla-style, out on the sun-bleached streets of Los Angeles. No studio backing, no controlled sets, no crew of hundreds. Just cameras small enough to disappear into a crowd and a story fizzing with too much energy to sit still for a conventional shoot. That scrappy, run-and-gun approach turns out to be exactly right for the film he wanted to make. You feel the city, the heat, the chaos of Christmas Eve, in a way that a more comfortable production almost certainly would have smoothed away.
I went in knowing next to nothing, and I am genuinely glad of it. A fair part of the pleasure is watching the thing reveal itself as it goes, so I will keep the plot light: it unfolds across a single day in the lives of two trans women working the streets of LA. One has just come out of a short spell inside and, on learning that her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her the whole time she was away, storms across the city to have it out with him. The other carries on with her day, chasing dramas of her own. The two storylines wind around each other, pulling tighter as the hours tick towards midnight.
Both leads, newcomers Baker cast off the street rather than out of a casting agency, are terrific. There is a raw, lived-in truth to their performances that you simply could not fake, and it gives the film a credibility that no amount of craft could manufacture from scratch. They are funny, too. Tangerine moves fast and it moves light for long stretches, frequently laugh-out-loud in the way that only really happens when characters feel genuinely real to you.
But it does not flinch, either. There are a scene or two that caught me genuinely flat-footed, moments of startling frankness that land without warning. And for all the comedy buzzing through the first two thirds, the film builds to a final stretch that sneaks up on you. It is unexpectedly moving, even quietly devastating in places, and it hits far harder than the breezy opening would ever lead you to expect. That tonal shift, handled clumsily, could have felt like whiplash. Baker pulls it off.
What I kept coming back to, after it was done, was the warmth of the thing. This is a film about people the movies usually cannot be bothered to see, let alone care about, and it looks at them with real compassion, real curiosity, real affection. It reminded me a little of how I felt watching The Watermelon Woman, that same sense of a filmmaker insisting on the full humanity of people who rarely get that treatment on screen. It is a different world, a different register entirely, but the impulse feels similar.
This was the film that announced Baker as a talent to watch, a couple of years before The Florida Project brought him to a wider audience. You can see why. He has an instinct for texture and place, for finding drama that does not announce itself with swelling music and meaningful close-ups, for letting a story breathe even when it is moving at a sprint.
Three and a half stars. A scrappy, bighearted blast, and I am very glad I stumbled into it blind.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-09-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · fuboTV · Philo · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
