Tangerine review: For a film shot entirely on an iPhone, this one is hilariously inspiring

The marketing hook and buzzword for Sean Baker’s Tangerine has been the fact that it was shot entirely on iPhones. Apple’s little device has been used previously for motion pictures, even by bigwigs like Park Chan Wook (Night Fishing). No prior film, however, has had the kind of acclaim that Tangerine has garnered. Is the worth the hype then? Absolutely.

The most surprising aspect of Tangerine is how funny it is, and there’s hardly a dull moment in the film. It’s so entertaining, in fact, that it could kick start a whole genre of films about trans-prostitutes in Los Angeles. Aesthetics and gimmicks hardly make for a great film, and Tangerine has a really fun story to back up its shot-on-an-iPhone hook.

A transgender sex worker named Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) walks out of jail and is seething with rage. She’s heard that her pimp Chester (James Ransone) has begun liaising with a Fish – that is, a straight female who was naturally born as a woman. So she teams up with her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) and prowls around a red light district to find Chester and his fish and beat the crap out of them.

The whole revenge angle is hilarious, and it’s cleverly used as a base for director Baker to explore the snazzy parlance of the film’s characters and the quirky retro and often downtrodden world they inhabit. Sin-Dee shoots her mouth off like her life depends on it, and the barrage of expletives that come naturally to her is mined for comedy. In any other film the red light ghettos filled with meth addicts would be a serious and depressing drama, but Tangerine showcases the darkly funny side of things in such a neighborhood.

Even the Fish (Mickey O’Hagan) turns out to be a hilariously pathetic drug addict whom Sin-Dee drags by her hair all over the streets. On paper it’s all offensive as hell, but Baker’s direction and the performances somehow makes this weirdly heartfelt and also enjoyable. The quieter moments in the film therefore carry an unexpected emotional weight.

It’s impossible to ignore the technology fuelling the film. An iPhone renders amazing pictures but they look good on Facebook, and pixelate when expanded to larger screens. Tangerine on the big screen, however, looks more amazing than most films that are shot with gigantic Red cameras. Baker and his cinematographer Radium Cheung achieved this with specially customized lenses attached to their iPhones and a lot of postproduction processing.

The amount of work involved must have been excruciating seeing as every frame of the film needed to be corrected to achieve the aesthetics seen in the film. And it’s not just the fact that the video quality is great, it’s that the camera movement in the film is stunning. The little sequences in a brothel and in a car wash will blow your mind.

That way Tangerine is a big addition to the indie revolution brewing in the film industry. It was made for peanuts, shot on a phone and chronicles a few characters in a neighborhood, and it managed to find itself on big screens and win big acclaim at international film festivals. If this doesn’t inspire young budding filmmakers to pick up their cameras and begin making great art, nothing will.

This movie was screened at part of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. 

Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is a venture of Reliance Industries, which owns Network18 (of which Firstpost is a part).