Take Out with Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou
Friday, 10:15 pm, Regal Downtown #3
Directors: Sean Baker, Shih-Ching Tsou
Writers: Sean Baker, Shih-Ching Tsou
Cinematographer: Sean Baker
Cast: Charles Jang, Justin Wan
Running Time: 87 min
Co-directors Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou display an assured and economic sense of cinema in this 2004 feature, which uses a day in the life of a Chinese immigrant to present a meditation on city life, immigrant culture, and the current state of the American Dream. Shooting in digital video, Baker and Tsou employ the medium to great effect: their New York is not idealistically stylized, but presented with blank objectivity—simply the city as it is.
Baker and Tsou, in neo-realist fashion, employ a bare-bones story line: Ming must obtain a sufficient amount of money before nightfall to appease the loan sharks who secured his entrance into the country. Within that simple framework, the filmmakers create a narrative that resonates with massive emotional weight thanks to the strikingly genuine events that are presented. Throughout the day, the makeshift family that forms the restaurant’s staff cooks the food and deals with customers as Ming bikes all around the city, from lowly tenements to luxurious condos, repeating the same process of delivery over and over. This sense of inescapable repetition serves powerfully to underscore the severity of Ming’s plight.
The cast, comprised wholly of non-professional actors, conveys honest, unaffected performances. Charles Jang, in the lead as Ming, proves especially noteworthy as he fully embodies the conflicted sense of hope and despair that defines the immigrant’s life.
Along with Baker’s latest feature, this year’s Prince of Broadway (also showing at the 2008 Virginia Film Festival), Take Out proves one of the great documents of New York City in the 21st century: a vibrant, difficult metropolis full of rich characters and sadly overlooked personal struggles.
