Tangerine Tragedy

When I first searched out the 2015 film Tangerine, I was surprised to find a very contrasting set of genres. Tangerine is listed primarily as a comedy, then a drama, then suspense. While the drama was clear, I didn’t feel that Tangerine was a comedy. Indeed, the longer I watched, the more I felt it was a tragedy. It was a wonderful film, but it was not easy to watch, perhaps if only because it was very clear that there was no way the film could end with any sense of dignity.

Tangerine is a film primarily based on one day in the lives of Sin-Dee and Alexandra, two trans women working in the sex industry. Sin-Dee is released from prison only to discover her fiance has cheated on her, and goes on a wild trip across Los Angeles to hunt down the “other woman,” while Alexandra prepares for a performance, where she will be singing at a local bar. Throughout all of this is a side plot following an Armenian taxi driver named Razmik who is a regular of the local trans sex workers. 

The thing that stuck with me through the film was the overall lingering feeling I associate with “Chekov’s Gun.” Chekov’s Gun is a principle based on a quotation attributed to Chekov, claiming that “if in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” While I can comfortably say that I consider Tangerine to be an enjoyable film, I felt the presence of the metaphorical pistol keenly the entire film. All of the characters have strong desires and personalities, and the ways they seek them are rather messy, with Sin-Dee’s violence toward Dinah, Alexandra’s aggressive advertising of her show, and Razmik’s familial situation and secret keeping. I knew early on that there was no way this story would end with a conventional happy ending. The film is honest. Sadly this is the truth of life for many women, and it’s very clear that the truth isn’t kind, and it isn’t always dignified. For Sin-Dee, I knew that her relationship with Chester was unlikely to be healthy, and her refusal to blame him would only make things worse. Sure enough, once she’s found Chester he pits her further against the other women around her and deflects blame, and she is left feeling lied to. The people Alexandra pushed to come to see her show were clearly uninterested and insincere with her, and in the end Sin-Dee and her captive are the only ones to see her show, which she had to pay the bar to perform in the first place. Razmik’s story was rough from the beginning, as he works in a taxi, seeking out trans sex workers to escape his marriage and gain what he could not get from his wife, and his mother-in-law’s interference makes his home life even worse.

This film ultimately pits women against each other, whether it was Alexandra sleeping with Chester while Sin-Dee was in jail, Razmik’s wife struggling with both the prostitutes her husband slept with and her mother’s rage, or Sin-Dee systematically hunting down Dinah and attacking her, dragging her half barefoot through the streets of Los Angeles. This film is not kind to women. To be quite honest, neither is life. Tangerine is honest, and in that way, it is very much a tragedy.