Tangerine is an easy enough film to distill into big ideas and bold print titles - the indie film shot on iPhones, the one about transexual sex workers. Its above the title descriptors are the kind of labels that make it a curiosity of cinephiles, and a cobra’s nest of politics and content you might not want to tackle with your family over hot cocoa. It’s the kind of Christmas movie you should share with the people in your life who reflect the bonds of friendship and companionship that gets shared in the quiet moments of the movie. And Tangerine is a reflection of a Christmas that exists outside of the carols and traditional standards of the season, when the real world butts up against the weird fantasy of lights, ornaments and visions of sugar plums.



Taking place in Southern California, a mediterranean climate where Christmas Day is often in the 70 degrees range, the story jettisons any reflections of a "White Christmas". The days are bright, the sun is comfortable, and there’s a grittiness and worn texture to almost everything that's interacted with. An exchange between another cab driver from Razmik’s company and a woman looking for Razmik features a funny but reflective moment about how the climate doesn’t feel like Christmas, a very relatable moment and feeling for me as a citizen of the desert southwest of Arizona.

Taking a queue from the climate, director Sean Baker mostly eschews the Christmas standards and instead drives the movie with pulsing music that wouldn’t be out of place on a dance floor. In the movies more quiet moments, classical strings rise to juxtapose the harsh reality of the world around Alex and Sin-Dee. The score is interrupted by a beautiful performance of ‘Toyland’, and I find this be an especially nice moment of contrast by Baker; the song has become a Christmas standard, while the film it’s from, Babes In Toyland, has little to do with Christmas save childish aspirations and dreams.