Cash on Delivery: The Other Manhattan of 'Take Out'
Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou's little-seen 2004 film depicts the precarious life of Chinese immigrants working on the margin's of New York City.
About midway through Take Out, a 2004 film co-directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou that’s receiving a new home video release via the Criterion Collection, Ming Ding (Charles Jang) runs into a problem that could make a day that began with him being awakened and assaulted by some toughs working for a loan shark even worse. An undocumented Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman for a Manhattan Chinese restaurant (the kind of place that serves fried rice and french fries), Ming discovers that his bicycle has developed a flat tire while returning from a delivery. He needs the bike, especially today, when he has to put together enough tips to pay an installment on a staggering debt taken out at an even more staggering interest rate. No bike means no money and no money means, at best, even more bodily harm as Ming’s goal of bringing his wife and the child he’s never met to join him in the U.S. recedes further in the distance, all as the city around him bustles without any acknowledgement of his existence.
It’s tempting to see the moment as a nod to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and Baker and Tsou have cited Italian neo-realism as an influence on the film (along with, as film academic J.J. Murphy notes in the accompanying essay, the Dardenne brothers and Dogme 95). But it plays more like a connection created by common circumstances. Decades and miles divide the Rome captured by De Sica and the Take Out’s New York, but the tools available to those scraping together a precarious existence on the fringes remain the same.
At least part of Take Out's effectiveness comes from the way it’s structured. When Ming arrives at work after borrowing part of the money from a none-too-happy relative working at a sweatshop, Young (Jeng-Hua Yu), a sympathetic co-worker, agrees to let him have all of the day’s deliveries and, with them, all the tips. The film follows Ming as he works from the moment the restaurant opens to the moment it closes, and a bit beyond, capturing dozens of fleeting interactions with customers. Unable to speak English and seemingly just as unable to smile — when Young attempts to teach him how to charm others with a grin and a “Thank you very much” Ming can’t even fake his way through it — he’s a face others see for a few moments as they exchange cash for food before bestowing a modest tip (most of the time). They don’t have to think about Ming’s life once the door closes. The film demands we do.
That means following him to places most viewers would never go, whether the restaurant’s cramped kitchen or the glimpsed lives of his customers, who range from a squabbling couple (one half of which is sick of take out) to an overworked mom to a man enraged to receive chicken instead of beef. The found locations and non-professional cast add to the sense of authenticity. Baker and Tsou shot Take Out for $3000 and on the film's audio commentary, they recall letting crew members go because they realized they could do more with less, like shooting in a real restaurant while it was open for business.
The stripped-down approach undoubtedly increased the level of difficulty, but pays off in authenticity, both in scenes capturing the routine of running a eatery specializing in fast turnaround food and the casting of Wang-Thye Lee, the manager of the real-life restaurant, as Ming’s boss, a neighborhood fixture who enjoys a friendly rapport with her regulars but has no patience for fools who ask her to spread duck sauce on their food rather than opening the packets for themselves.
Take Out was largely unseen at the time — it premiered at Slamdance then waited years for a small theatrical run — but now looks ahead to Baker and Tsou’s future work. Tsou has served as a producer on Baker films like Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, all films about lives on the margins and small, meaningful moments of connection that shine a little light before fading away.
It’s a coincidence that Take Out’s receiving a revival alongside the recent re-release of Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, another largely handheld movie set along in the perilous in-between spaces of post-9/11 New York. Both films take place on the edge of a vacuum that threatens to swallow up the protagonist. Both feel like products of a particular time and place in look and atmosphere while telling stories that could occur at any time in a city where those without means or meaningful personal connections seem on the verge of meeting an ill-starred fate or simply drifting away. (The cabs in Take Out are topped with images from Finding Nemo, but they could just as easily be advertising Minions: The Rise of Gru.) While Young may believe it when he says, “A boat straightens its course when it gets to the bridge,” and his own life might bear out the aphorism, Ming’s not so sure. The film is filled with a sense that one wrong move could be the end of an American dream as fragile as the tire of a bike.
I had no idea Sean Baker had done anything before Tangerine. This definitely sounds like a Criterion release to grab.
I had never heard of this but it sounds amazing! It also sounds similar to early Ramin Bahrani films. I’m wondering how it compares to Man Push Cart in particular, which is stylistically and even content-wise similar and came out just a year later.