New Spanish Cinema
Some highlights of HOME’s final ¡Viva! weekender Words: Jamie Dunn
Pos eso
“D
Tangerine Dreams Tangerine is the most exciting and invigorating indie film of the year. Its director, Sean Baker, talks us through the ins and outs of creating this vivid slice-of-life comedy about two transgender LA sex workers and capturing it all on an iPhone lens
T
angerine is not your typical Christmas movie. You’ll probably realise this while watching the scene in which a hyperactive transgender prostitute drags a skinny white girl kicking and screaming from a fleapit motel room that doubles as a makeshift brothel, with each space in the tiny apartment (bedroom, hallways, cupboards, shower) being used for some sex act, like a Russian doll of debauchery. Or maybe it’s just the opening line that gives it away: “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch.” This raucously funny comedy takes the form of a day in the life of Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), best friends, trans women, and sex workers in West Hollywood. We meet the pair as they share a single doughnut at a garish, Formica-clad dive called Donut Time on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where they’re celebrating Sin-Dee’s recent emancipation following a 28-day jail stint. When we meet the film’s director, Sean Baker, at a fancy London hotel a million miles from Tangerine’s hardscrabble streets, he explains that this notorious stretch of Los Angeles, which acts as the city’s unofficial red light district, was his chief inspiration for the movie. Actually, it was his entire pitch to producers Mark and Jay Duplass. “Mark said, ‘OK, what’s your idea?’ and I just said, ‘Santa Monica and Highland,’ and that’s all I had to say. He knew the intersection.” The simple plot kicks off as soon as Alexandra lets slip that Sin-Dee’s boyfriend and pimp, Chester (played by Baker regular James Ransone), has been stepping out on her. What makes matters worse is that the other woman was born a woman. Or, to use Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s vernacular, she’s “a real fish, like a girl with a vagina and everything.” Hell hath no fury like a trans woman scorned. With this revelation Sin-Dee heads off on a rampage looking for revenge, like a pint-sized Godzilla in leopard print blouse and white hotpants. Baker’s expressive camera loops and twirls as it tries to keep up with her. “I would love to take credit and say that I envisioned this hyperactive style from the
18
Feature
beginning,” says the director when we commend him for the film’s breakneck pace, “but it wasn’t like that.” Baker had something more austere in mind, a gritty social-realist drama with observational camera and no music. His leading ladies weren’t having any of it, though. “Mya said to me, ‘You can show all the brutal reality, but you need to make this funny. It’s not fair if you make this movie and it only appeals to the geriatric arthouse crowd. It also has to appeal to the girls on the street.’” The chaotic nature of the location also played its part. The film feels as hopped-up as its residents – “crystal meth is like an epidemic around there and it just rubbed off on us.” Baker and his crew were shooting on the hoof and on the edge. “Chris [Bergoch, Tangerine’s co-writer] got his wallet stolen on the first day of filming,” Baker reveals. “We were always holding our equipment and looking over our shoulder because we had no idea what was going on around us. We didn’t have security, so the manic shoot just made its way into the movie.”
“Crystal meth is like an epidemic around there and it just rubbed off on us” Sean Baker
Tangerine might be the first case in film history where a meagre budget has helped enhance the aesthetic. Since its premiere at Sundance in January this year, Baker’s film has been known, unofficially, as “that iPhone movie” – it was shot entirely on iPhone 5s. Sounds like an arty gimmick, right? You’re probably picturing the ugly, out-of-focus video you made on your last night out, or the shaky footage you shot at that gig last month. Think again. With the addition of a
Interview: Jamie Dunn
handheld Steadicam support, an $8 app, and some prototype anamorphic adapter lenses, Baker manages to merge the supersaturated colour of iPhone footage with the sweeping, cinematic grandeur of a Sergio Leone movie. What’s most pleasing about Tangerine, however, is that it brings to life on screen a subculture that’s rarely visible in mainstream culture. A big part of this success is down to the casting: Rodriguez and Taylor are both non-actors and from this world. Baker found them while scouting in the neighbourhood’s LGBTQ community centre and shaped his film around them. “It wasn’t just about casting trans people to play trans roles,” explains Baker. “It was also about getting approval from them, about input from them, about basically consulting them. We would give them dialogue and they would say, ‘That sounds like a 35-year-old white boy wrote that.’ And I’d be like, ‘OK, that’s out the window.’ That’s what I wanted.” This did put Baker on a bit of a learning curve: “You would hear the girls say a word and you would just be like, ‘Definition?’” Casting trans women to play trans women might seem a no-brainer, but it’s against the grain of Hollywood’s current philosophy. From Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon, to Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, to Eddie Redmayne in the upcoming The Danish Girl, cisgender actors have been playing transgender characters for years and been showered with awards in the process. Baker’s attitude to this casting trend is pragmatic as well as political. “Look, hopefully down the line none of this stuff matters, everyone is accepted, humankind becomes one, et cetera,” he says. “But right now we’re in 2015 and you have to look at where we are in history. There is a very high unemployment rate among trans people, even higher among trans women of colour, so if there are roles out there and you can help them get jobs, why not do that on the level of human decency. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying Eddie shouldn’t have his job – he should, he’s a wonderful actor and I’m sure he did a great job. But I’m just talking about right now in 2015. Maybe we should be thinking a different way until acceptance is universal.” Tangerine is released 13 Nov by Metrodome
FILM
o you know what he did, your cunting son?” Not a line you’d expect from a stop-motion claymation directed by a veteran of Wallace and Gromit animation-house Aardman, but you’ll find it, along with plenty of other blush-inducing lines and copious scenes of inventive violence, in the gloriously dark comedy Pos eso (6&7 Nov), directed by Samuel Ortí Martí aka SAM. The film, one of the absolute must-sees from HOME’s latest ¡Viva! weekender, follows the familial strife of a flamenco superstar, Trini, who’s slowly coming to the realisation that her son, Damian (of course), may be possessed by the devil. Her only hope is Father Lenin, a priest losing his faith. If you haven’t guessed from that description, Pos eso is a cheeky riff on The Exorcist by way of The Omen, but SAM packs in plenty of other references to keep things surprising, from A Trip to the Moon to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Family discord is also at the heart of festival opener film Felices 140 (5&9 Nov). This biting moral comedy concerns a 40th birthday celebration that turns nasty when the birthday girl reveals to the gathered guests that she’s won the Euromillions jackpot. Soon friends and family are plotting how to get a share of the bounty. Puncturing the hypocrisy of the Spanish middleclass is director Gracia Querejeta’s speciality, and this is one of her most cutting efforts. Requisitos para ser una persona normal (6&7 Nov) delivers comedy of the quirkier kind. There are shades of Miranda July in this debut from actor Leticia Dolera (she played the chainsaw-wielding bride in Rec 3), who also stars as a 30-year-old who’s trying to fit in. Her plan for normality is a checklist that includes getting herself a job, a social life and – the requirement of any romantic comedy – a boyfriend. But who will she choose? The good-looking charmer, or her chunky best pal who holds her head under the duvet when he breaks wind? Dolera’s film doesn’t deliver many surprises, but it does have oodles of charm. ¡Viva! isn’t all laughs. Another highlight is Pablo Malo’s incendiary drama Lasa eta Zabala (7&8 Nov), which takes as its starting point the real-life assassinations of two Basque separatists by Spain’s state-sponsored anti-terrorist group GAL, and follows the ensuing murder trial, which the State tried to curtail. If you’re unfamiliar with Basque Country politics, fear not: Malo will be in Manchester for a Q&A after the screening on the 7th, where you can pick his brains. ¡Viva! will be reinvented next year as a multi-artform festival. Until then, enjoy this packed weekend of Spanish cinematic delights. ¡Viva! Presents New Spanish Cinema runs 5-9 Nov at HOME, Manchester. For full details, go to homemcr.org/event/viva-presents-new-spanish-cinema
THE SKINNY