Take Out

As should be obvious to people who have been following my film reviews over the years, I search out works that take the struggles of ordinary working people as their subject matter. When they succeed artistically, they earn my highest plaudits. As “Take Out” met those goals with a budget of only $3000, you truly feel like you have entered the realm of the miraculous.

Co-directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, “Take Out” is a documentary-like look at the working day of Ming Ding, an undocumented Chinese restaurant deliveryman. The film starts inauspiciously enough with the incursion of two loan-sharking thugs into the roach-infested two-bedroom apartment Ming shares with a number of other Chinese immigrant workers. Like everything else in this neorealist jewel of a movie, the apartment is real. Ming has to come up with the money he owes them for the fee they exacted for smuggling him into the U.S. or else. As a taste of what awaits him if he can’t come up with the money, they beat him with a hammer.

The remaining scenes take place either in the Chinese take-out restaurant, the streets of New York as Ming pedals along dodging traffic with his goods, or in the doorways of the apartments where deliveries are made. The restaurant was a real restaurant on the Upper West Side that accommodated the film-makers as people came in off the street to purchase their chicken lo mein, etc. Big sister, the woman who operated the cash register and took orders over the phone, was the actual employee of the restaurant. Her banter with the customers (she tells one who is over-demanding to fuck himself in Chinese) serves as a kind of aural connective tissue throughout the movie substituting for an obtrusive film score.

Watching her interact with the customers as the cooks go about their business of chopping, dicing and frying food in woks has the same kind of spellbinding effect as watching a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Despite the quotidian nature of the proceedings, you find yourself drawn into a world that you have only seen from the outside.

But this is not a Wiseman documentary. It is a story about the struggle of a simple man against economic odds that is as dramatically effective as Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thief”, in which a man’s bicycle is stolen–his sole means of economic survival. The rest of De Sica’s masterpiece is devoted to his and his son’s search to recover it. While Ming never loses his bicycle, he is just as desperate to pay off his debt. In both movies, you feel both terror and pity as society’s forgotten men mount unforgettable struggles. In their own way, they are like Odysseus trying to return home.

After watching “Take Out”, you will never see a deliveryman in the same light again. When you watch Ming turning over the bags of food to the people in the doorway (real New Yorkers who responded to the film-makers’ invitation in Craigslist), you pray that they will give him a good tip since it is a matter of life and death. Unless he can put together the money the loan sharks demand, he will be beaten up or worse.

Throughout the film, it looks like he will make his goal since it is pouring rain. He understands that New Yorkers tend to order take out meals when the weather is bad. As Ming drives through the torrential downpour, you suffer with him. Throughout it all, Ming maintains a sullen and stoic appearance. He has no choice. This is his economic fate. Young, his jovial fellow deliveryman who has generously allowed Ming to take over his own duties for the day, advises him that the tips will be bigger if he smiles broadly and tells the customers “Thank you very much”.

Ming spurns this advice since it is not in his character. His sole motivation is to keep working so that he can send money back home to China to the wife and son he has left behind. In keeping with the minimalist (but authentic) style that pervades this movie, the key reference to them is a scene in which Ming gazes longingly at their photo. No dialog is needed here.

The story of how “Take Out” made it to the screen is almost as inspiring as Ming’s. The directors decided to make a quintessential New York movie, which for them was not the New York of Woody Allen or Sex in the City. It is the New York of housing projects, cheap restaurants, undocumented workers and the barracks-like apartments they live in.

In an interview with IndieWIRE, Sean Baker was asked to elaborate on his and his co-director’s approach to making films and their goals for the project. He replied:

We read a lot on the subject before sitting down and writing. One of the most helpful books on the subject is “Forbidden Workers” by Peter Kwong, the chair of the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College. Then we had to go out and do our own research by speaking to illegals who worked at take-outs and people who were close to them. The bulk of our research came when we locked our location. We shot B-roll (cut aways) for over a month before actual production. It was during that time that we spoke to Ms. Lee (who plays the character of Big Sister) and the actual cooks at the restaurant. They guided us in terms of accuracy. They opened up very much so to Shih-Ching, being that she knows Mandarin and she’s a female. They would talk for hours while I went around with the camera and shot everything I could.

Our goal was to capture truth in every aspect of the film from the acting to the look to the sound design. I feel in the end we “faked” reality better than most films that are trying to do so. That may sound cocky but I feel that some of our scenes come as close to a documentary feel that a fiction film can get.

“Take Out”, the best film I have seen this year so far, is playing at the Quad Cinema in New York City and I strongly urge you to see it. It will change your perception of the world around you and the people who live in it forever.

Official Film Website