Take Out by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou at Twenty
By the time Sean Baker became A24’s indie darling with The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), he already had a number of stellar independent feature films already under his belt. Take Out (2004), Baker’s breakout film and second ever feature (his debut feature Four Letter Words (2000) remains rather elusive), first premiered at Slamdance twenty years ago. The Criterion Collection remastered Take Out into 4K and produced a short documentary on the making of the film, Reflecting on Take Out, in 2022.
Baker co-directed Take Out with Shih-Ching Tsou, who has become an important collaborator in Baker’s career, as she has produced, acted in, and costume designed several of his later films. Baker is often hailed as an auteur, but it is important to note Tsou’s indispensable contributions to his films. Her contribution to Take Out is vital, as Tsou is fluent in Mandarin and Baker is not.
Inspired by the Dogme 95 movement and the Dardenne brothers, Baker and Tsou originally envisioned the project as a peek into New York apartments through the eyes of a food delivery driver, but soon discovered a more compelling story through their research. Take Out is a prime example of form and content seamlessly coming together to grab us by our collars and wrench our hearts from our chests. Shot in cinéma vérité style, Take Out follows a day in the life of Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an illegal Chinese immigrant who is struggling to pay off his loan shark debt by working for tips as a Chinese food delivery driver on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Baker and Tsou’s fly on the wall approach to capturing the comings and goings of a real Chinese take out restaurant on 103rd St and Amsterdam Ave makes for an unrelentingly authentic look at the harsh conditions of food delivery work. We can do nothing but witness Ming Ding’s frustration as he bikes long distances in pouring rain and suffers disrespectful verbal abuse from unhappy customers. Three cooks were actually working during the shoot, as was the MVP of the film, Wang Thye Lee, who ran the counter and played the character of Big Sister at the same time. Resourcefully making use of real rain, real city streets, real New Yorkers, and real workers in a neorealist method is not only cheaper, but it is so much more effective in communicating Ming Ding’s compounding stress, than if studio execs were to spend millions of dollars on actors and sets.
Take Out marks the beginning of Baker and Tsou’s careers of documenting the margins of American life, often calling the American dream into question. Although the budgets of Baker’s films have grown since Take Out, and his narratives with them, his penchant for authenticity through street casting and shooting on location in order to ask social questions has remained steadfast. Baker and Tsou are not filmmakers who have betrayed their independent roots after working for over two decades, which is not something to take lightly in this economy. Tackling tough subjects such as food delivery work, sex work, abject poverty, and drug addiction without either glamorizing or adding to the exploitation of the already marginalized takes a rare bravery and kindness.
Take Tangerine (2015), famously shot using three iPhones, Baker’s odyssey into the life of Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a black transgender sex worker on a mission to get her cheating boyfriend back, and the lives of those around her in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. Exactly as he did in Take Out, Baker used street casting and on-location shooting to craft a high stakes narrative that might be stressful for most of the film, but ultimately shifts into a story of tender solidarity. Both Sin-Dee and Ming Ding exist on the outskirts of society, and are vying to attain something that seems impossible (for Sin-Dee, it’s the respect of her pimp boyfriend, and for Ming Ding, it’s the cash flow needed to pay off his crushing debt). When all hope seems lost, they are both saved not by some well-off savior, but by someone in as equally humble of circumstances as themselves.
What have we, as a legally documented, middle to upper class society learned about how to treat food delivery drivers in the two decades since Take Out’s original release? The answer, of course, is absolutely nothing. In fact, we are sprinting in the opposite direction by greatly expanding the exploitative delivery industry on the backs of undocumented workers. Now, not only must delivery drivers travel long distances in the pouring rain for an unpredictable amount of income, but delivery app giants also take a cut.
There may have been a pandemic sentiment that delivery drivers are essential workers, but that has since worn off, and the widespread entitled attitude for dinner delivered to your door has stuck around. If you live in any major city, you are most likely used to seeing droves of delivery drivers zipping around town, rain or shine. Perhaps when Baker and Tsou made Take Out, the plight of the delivery worker could have been considered more invisible, but that certainly is not the case today. Fast food establishments are increasingly becoming packed not with customers, but with delivery drivers. There is no denying that the demand for instant food delivery has ballooned beyond our control. While there has been much online discourse regarding what should be done about the issue, only one real solution has been put forward: over the summer of 2023, the New York State Supreme Court raised the minimum wage for app based delivery drivers up to $19.96 starting in 2025, going against the appeals of DoorDash, Uber, and Grubhub.
Baker and Tsou are artists, not politicians. Therefore, their job is to raise questions about, not provide answers to, society’s many ailments. Filmmakers with a lot of money on the line are often tasked with soothing their audiences on social issues, assuring them that our institutions will swoop in and do what’s right, because industry knowledge dictates that this optimistic attitude will sell tickets, and bleak realism will not. The longevity of Baker and Tsou’s independent filmmaking careers is a testament to audiences’ hunger for more realistic, less blindly optimistic, stories outside of the mainstream.
Sean Baker’s latest film Anora was acquired by Neon in November 2023, but plot details are still under wraps. Shih-Ching Tsou recently directed Left-Handed Girl, a film about a single mother and her two daughters’ return to Taipei. Le Pacte is handling international distribution, but no release date has been set. You can watch Take Out on the Criterion Channel.
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