Tangerine review – tenderness amid the artificiality of LA

This week’s big release, Steve Jobs, opens with black-and-white footage of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke eerily predicting a future in which compact personal computers are an integral part of our everyday lives. Danny Boyle’s film could equally well have ended with scenes from Sean Baker’s Tangerine, a vibrantly colourful feature shot entirely on a modified iPhone 5s. It’s not the first phone-footage film (forerunners include Olive, shot on a Nokia N8 in 2011), but it’s certainly the best looking, using prototype anamorphic lens adapters to capture gorgeous widescreen vistas while shooting on the fly in the streets, burger bars and doughnut joints of LA.

Newcomer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez brings a punchy authenticity to the role of Sin-Dee, a transgender sex worker on a Christmas Eve warpath for her pimp boyfriend, Chester (James Ransone), who’s been cheating on her with a non-trans newcomer while she was in prison. Enlisting the less-than-enthusiastic help of best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), Sin-Dee tears through a string of local haunts, creating smart-mouthed chaos as she searches for the errant lovers while Alexandra attempts to ready herself (“no drama!”) for an evening singing gig. Meanwhile, taxi driver Razmik (Baker regular Karren Karagulian) divides his time between hoiking vomiting drunks out of his cab and getting paid-for relief in a car wash while maintaining the illusion of “respectable” family life.

Fired by zesty performances that crackle and burn with energy, Tangerine is a bittersweet affair underpinned by a winning sense of empathy and affection. Amid the rank artificiality of LA, there is real tenderness and between these characters a camaraderie that takes the harsher edges off their often bleak circumstances. Rodriguez and Taylor are a terrific double act, their on-screen chemistry providing both laugh-out-loud comedy and moving melancholia. Baker brings the same nonjudgmental approach that characterised his Independent Spirit awards prize-winner Starlet, while an in-your-face soundtrack pumps up the volume to boisterous effect.