Take Out

A film set in New York. Ming Ding is a delivery man at a Chinese restaurant. He carries food by bicycle. He came into the country illegally. He has a debt and the debt is to the smugglers. Two men come to his flat in the morning. The payment is late and they beat him. A deadline is set: eight hundred dollars by that evening. From there the film spreads over one day. Ming borrows from friends. It is not enough. An arrangement is made at the restaurant. The other courier gives him his orders so he can collect more in tips. It rains. All day. From there the narrative is a counter. After each delivery the tip is counted and the figure rises slowly. A dollar, two dollars, sometimes nothing. Some customers are rude. Some do not open the door. Some leave extra. What the narrative is interested in is not poverty but margin: its idea is that a man's life depends on the size of a tip, and that the size is entirely random. The inside of the restaurant is shown too. The kitchen, the order phone, arguments and jokes. Most of the speech is in Chinese. The narrative does not consider translation necessary. Ming barely speaks. The camera watches him and says nothing about his inner life. The film was made on a very small budget. In a real restaurant, outside opening hours, on a consumer digital camera. Most of the cast are not professionals. Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou directed together; this is one of Baker's early works and the method of his later films is set here. Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu and Wang-Thye Lee are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes American independent cinema and narratives about daily labour. Who it is not for: anyone expecting technical quality; the image is rough, the sound sometimes weak, and the narrative is built wholly on repetition.