This article was published on Fandor in 2015 but is currently not online.
The films of Sean Baker are each guided foremost by person and place, finding the intersection between both that defines lives. In 2004’s Take Out, co-directed by Shih-Ching Tsou, the film follows as Ming Ding (Charles Jang), a Chinese food delivery worker, tries to pay off an $800 debt by running as many orders as possible in a single day. Ming is an ill-adjusted immigrant: quiet, timid, and intimidated by the claustrophobic surroundings of the fragmented stretch of New York he navigates uneasily on his bicycle between the restaurant and his destinations. Shot mostly in tight on faces—by Sean Baker himself, who was also cinematographer on the follow-up Prince of Broadway—the shaky DV aesthetic gives only awkward glimpses of the environment, capturing Ming’s sense of displacement and alienation. It’s one of the great films about the immigrant experience, and it succeeds because its story comes second to its reality: Baker always follows the lead of the characters he creates as if they precede the movies themselves. Their plights are taken seriously, in the vein of neorealism.
Prince of Broadway centers on a New York street hustler from Ghana named Lucky (Prince Adu) who flags down passersby to lead them to the secret back room of a conspicuous clothing shop to sell them discounted Gucci knockoffs. Baker introduces us to his daily life and work. We see how he attracts customers, how he interacts with his “boss” Levon (played by Karren Karagulian, a non-professional who has appeared in all of Baker’s films), hangs out with his girlfriend—before disrupting this status quo with the arrival of a baby. A fling from the past shows up on a stairway with a toddler in hand that she claims is his before leaving it with him and taking off. Completely unprepared for this new responsibility, Broadway tracks Lucky as he incorporates this major complication into his reality. Shot in doc-style again, Baker’s intelligence with the camera has evolved to an Albert Maysles level of patience and sensitivity, attuned to the gestures of the people he films, again as humans before characters, life before cinema. Levon has a seemingly unrelated subplot in which he has to deal with the growing dissatisfaction of his young 26 year old wife at home. While this trajectory hardly intertwines with Lucky’s, it expands the frame of empathy beyond one perspective, making note of the struggles that lie side by side in simultaneity with the main plot— a device revisited in Baker’s latest film, Tangerine.
In Starlet, Baker gave up the cinematographer reigns to Radium Cheung and the result was his most visually refined film yet. This teaming up is a major turning point. Baker’s own cinematography on his first two films was rough but sharp, creating beauty out of of-the-moment documentary style shaky cam with a consciousness—but Cheung finds a refined balance between the realism that has always driven Baker, and a more rigorous formal approach tailored to the subject of the films, adding an extra layer of expression to articulate the world and its characters through visual means, while still packing an intense, dramatic punch. Cheung’s anamorphic lensing of the bleached out San Fernando Valley is way more “L.A.” than Baker’s previous camerawork, which was better suited for busy New York hustle and bustle. The lazy Cali vibes that run through Starlet are captured beautifully by Cheung’s frames, which marry flaring sunlight and dull suburban housing in unified aesthetic detail. Dree Hemingway plays a young woman we discover is working in porn films—but not until an hour into the wholly platonic film.
The point is simple but effective: Baker wants us to get to know her endearing character, free of the connotations of her profession, so as to suggest it does not define her, and in any case should not invite judgment. We become acquainted with how she interacts with her friends and co-workers, her relationship with her Chihuahua (named Starlet), and how she befriends an old woman after finding money in a thermos she purchased from her at a garage sale. In uniting these characters in an unlikely friendship, Baker expresses his empathy in a new way, overlapping two ways of living and places in life that exist in the same place and unite in mutual need. Although reconfigured, Starlet is another film about characters simply struggling to gain balance in their lives.
Tangerine, Sean Baker’s latest film, is not as subtle or casual in revealing the chosen vocation of its main character. Sin-Dee Rella (played tremendously by newcomer Kiki Lee Key) comes out swinging (and swearing) as an exuberant transgender hooker working Santa Monica Boulevard. The gesture of the nonchalance of introducing the viewer to Sin-Dee’s lifestyle again implies no judgment for the way of life portrayed in the film. With its saturated cartoon colors, Tangerine is guided by her personality—the film is made on her terms, on her level, it is never above her, and neither is the viewer. Sean Baker’s greatest virtue is his utter lack of condescension. Every type of person is worth meeting, and every type of person can be a good one. The core of Baker’s cinema is generous and genuinely humanist.
Impressively shot on iPhone 5s, Baker and Cheung follow Sin-Dee’s lead, crafting an almost fish-eyed, frenetic view of the infamous neighborhood and its surrounding area, energetically cut, with swooping camera movements, the camera’s emphatic gestures, articulated with the heightened “digitalness” of the format, are synonymous with the character’s heated tirade-parade after she discovers that her pimp-boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) cheated on her while she served a month in prison. The look of Tangerine is somewhat reminiscent of Tony Scott’s Domino, which also shaped its style around the lives of its eccentric characters (one can’t help but wonder what Scott would have done with these cameras were he still around).
The film’s always forward-moving plot throws the viewer right in the thick of the catty goings-on of this community, and bring out the candied soul of its streets. As discreetly as Starlet was about a porn actress, Tangerine is a Christmas movie. Taking place on Xmas Eve, you wouldn’t be able to tell in sun-basked streets of its setting, but at its heart, the film does value ideas of friendship and family that may not be conventional, but are in the spirit of the season. On the hunt to find Chester, Sin-Dee’s best friend, Alexandra (Mya Taylor), tries to calm her down and fan the raging fire that is her temperament—but nothing’s going to stop her before she confronts her unfaithful man. Their friendship though, is the heart of the film. Tracking down Dinah, the woman Chester has been cheating with, does not get in the way of Sin-Dee making sure to make it to Alexandra’s (otherwise unattended) singing performance at a dive bar later that night, instead dragging along this new enemy to the show.
The importance of a realist sense of geography is in all of Baker’s movies, and never more so than here where Sin-Dee’s route could practically be recreated by anyone paying close enough attention. Karren Karagulian plays Razmik, an Armenian taxi driver who demonstrates an alternative way of journeying the terrain. Tangerine is partly a film about walking and driving through L.A. As with Prince of Broadway, Karagulian’s character has an autonomous storyline. This time it crashes into the main plot in the film’s climactic showdown, which circles back to Donut Time, the location where the film first opens, a notorious counter-service joint and staple for the transgender prostitute community. Razmik has a wife and family at home to spend Christmas with, but we discover he has closeted desires when he picks up a female prostitute—and kicks her out of his car when he realizes she doesn’t have a dick in her pants. When his family confronts him at Donut Time, just as shit is hitting the fan between Sin-Dee, Chester, and the hooker he fooled around with while she was locked up, it makes for an interesting contrast: Sin-Dee’s outrageous personality, as well as those of the company she keeps, have an honesty and openness to them, and when situated next to Razmik’s illusory conventional family man existence, rings as more authentic.
The madness, commotion, and even life-ruining drama here is somehow is bent to the tune of comedy, and there’s something endearing in this chaotic donut shop melting pot of gender blending and family disruption, maybe because it somehow feels inclusive of so-called “deviant” lifestyle choices. Most importantly, the funny doesn’t come from pointing and laughing at the eccentric cast of characters, but from looking at the world through their eyes. More than anything, they’re fun to spend time with. The film begins and ends with Sin-Dee and Alexandra. A secret revealed towards the conclusion comes between them but doesn’t break them apart. A moment of humiliation for Sin-Dee leads to their reconciliation, as Alexandra comforts her in solidarity, and the film’s cartooniness dissolves in the mundane setting of a Laundromat, where a final gesture between these characters carries the weight of the world.
Baker’s films all end on the brink of new possibilities, the strengthening of bonds between new or old friends and the chance to create “family.” Tangerine may at first seem like a departure from the evolutionary strand you can trace through the prior features, but like them, this film is after the same authenticity, and tinged with the same humor and made with the same care. Always interested in people, usually minorities, occupying marginalized facets of society in the big city, curious about how their lives operate, how they speak (his last four features are all, in part, studies of specific “languages”) and how they define them, Baker’s films also have an anthropological instinct. Take Out, Prince of Broadway, Starlet and Tangerine are equally about getting inside specific social contexts, and understanding them. Put more simply, they are acts of solidarity that follow their characters as they try their best to make it through hard days.