Tangerine

Sean Baker’s Tangerine is a little like some of the creatures it describes the chicks with dicks who hangout at a place called Donut Time at the corner of Santa Monica and Highland in Hollywood. Remember Algebra I where you plotted graphs made up of equations in two variables or unknowns, x and y, plotting their coordinates. Tangerine is a mishmash of plots, one major  thread having to do with a pre-op transsexual Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who is looking for her lover and pimp, Chester (James Ransone) who has run away with “a real bitch vagina and everything” and the other, the story of an Armenian cabby Rizmat (Karren Karagulian) who likes to go down on ladyboys and is unmasked by his mother-in-law, Ashken (Alla Rumanian). But the movie is also like the evolution of our attitudes towards transgenderism. The bizarre, perverse and in case of the movie’s form, crude and improbable yesterday may be understood as normative or even inspired tomorrow. Tangerine titters on the line where found objects become Duchamp’s “Fountain,” both literally and metaphorically since one of the most touching scenes in the film occurs in a restroom. Chester functions a little like Hickey in the Iceman and also like the lost bicycle in the De Sica’s masterpiece. Tangerine, of course, owes a good deal to Italian neorealist cinema which used non professional actors (people playing their own lives) and to cinema verite and there is a bit of Midnight Cowboy in the settings with their pantheon of down at their heels hustlers whose fleshy commodification is underscored with street signs like the one which reads “collateral not always necessary.” But is Tangerine, the end of the line or the beginning of a new life? Just when you think the film’s besotted pair have reached the lowest rung on the food chain, on Xmas Eve in LA, they rise mightily for the occasion. By the way, speaking of new devices and techniques sexual and otherwise, the film was shot with iPhones.

House of Pleasures

Emile Zola is alive and well in the Paris of Bertrand Bonello’s House of  Pleasures, an almost clinical study of a turn of turn of the century brothel called L’Apollonide. The film employs jazzy cinematic tricks such as replaying a previously shown sequence in medias res. It’s one of a number of techniques which create several degrees of separation from pure naturalism. The cinema verite of Battle of Algiers could have been one way to deal with the subject, but it’s definitely not the approach here. Rather what we have is a lot pyrotechnics in the service of a didactic message that actually would have been better told in documentary style. There is the Jewess whose mouth is slit by a sadistic patron and who because of her disfigurement becomes known as “la femme qui rit”, “the woman  who smiles.” Another courtesan, Julie, is disfigured by the syphilitic canker sores which cover her face. One of the prostitutes weeps as she reads a scientific tract called Anthropmetric Study of Prostitutes and Thieves, given to her by a client, arguing that prostitutes have smaller heads which therefore contain less brain matter. The extravagant set piece in which the girls live is contrasted to the harsh lives that is microscopically observed from the start. They live in a state of perpetual debt to the madam that can never be paid off and the rituals of abuse, cleansing and routine inspection by an unkindly doctor are all acutely scrutinized by the camera. It should be mentioned that time is a sub theme, though it’s something that is relatively undeveloped. We are at the “twilight” of the nineteenth century as the film begins and at the “dawn” of the twentieth at another moment. And then with a rock score in the background we view street walkers in present day Paris. The world’s oldest profession indeed, but Nicholas Kristof’s Times columns about sex trafficking are ultimately a far more direct and effective jeremiad than the studied confusion of Bonello’s film.