Butler's Cinema Scene

Kitana Kiki Rodriguez as the transgender Sin-Dee

“TANGERINE” My rating: B+

88 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Caitlyn Jenner may have opened up a nationwide dialogue about the transgender experience, but it’s still business as usual for the shemales peddling their wares on L.A.’s mean streets.

Sin-Dee (a screen-dominating Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) has spent most of December in county lockup. Freed on Christmas Eve, the transgender prostitute immediately hits her old haunts looking for Hector, her boyfriend/pimp/drug pusher.

But word on the street is that Hector has spent the last month carousing with the new blonde in his life. To add insult to injury, this interloper is alleged to be a natural-born woman. “Like, vagina and all…”

This will not stand with Sin-Dee, who possesses the armor-plated ego of a Sherman tank.  Practically shooting off sparks and a trail of smoke, she sets off on an all-day quest to find and reclaim her man.

“Tangerine” could have been played as tragedy.  But instead of pithy social commentary, writer/director Sean Baker dishes laughs.

The result is a rollicking comedy about chicks with dicks. The characters who inhabit this underworld are totally unapologetic about who they are and how they earn a meager living. Spending 88 minutes with them is more eye-opening and informative than a score of earnest documentaries.

Sin-Dee’s companion on this  sexually-charged hunt is Alexandra (Maya Taylor), who was never a big Hector fan but sticks by her friend out of loyalty.  Also, hitting every dive on the strip gives Alexandra an opportunity to pass out invites for her big stage debut that night at a local club. She sees herself as an up-and-coming chanteuse.

Sin-Dee manhandles the hapless Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan)

About halfway through Sin-Dee kidnaps a skinny, dishwater blonde hooker named Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), whom she manhandles up one block and down the other.  She can’t even be sure that the pathetically whining Dinah is Hector’s new squeeze, but she’s got to take her frustrations out on somebody.

“Tangerine” features a second, somewhat less successful plot, centering on Razmik (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian cabbie who has a wife, baby and mother-in-law at home but cannot get his fill of transgender sex.  But it

does get confusing— at one point Razmik picks up a girl on the street and is outraged to discover that she’s actually a girl. A lecture follows on the importance of respecting boundaries…certain blocks are reserved

Maya Taylor as Alexandra

exclusively for transgender flesh peddlers.

“Tangerine” is often uproariously funny. As when Alexandra protests Sin-Dee’s abuse of Dinah: “You didn’t have to Chris Brown the bitch!”  Or when a customer tries to wheedle a reduced rate for sexual services because of the season: “C’mon, it’s Christmas!”

Occasionally it’s touching.

But if Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch are trying to deliver a lesson in tolerance, they have the good sense to couch it in raucous, bawdy hilarity.

The film is a technical marvel as well.  Baker shot it entirely on a smart phone.  The resulting images look terrific while retaining a handheld immediacy that roots “Tangerine” in reality despite the often outlandish goings on.

Holding the whole thing together is Rodriquez, whose Sin-Dee is a hugely amusing creation — radiating energy, nonstop chatter and righteous fury, sashaying through life like a transgender dervish.

She is the movie year’s most unexpected heroine…and “Tangerine” one of its most satisfying comedies.

| Robert W. Butler