Now that Sean Baker is the toast of Hollywood, hot off his armful of Oscars for Anora, we’re taking a look back at an early, lo-fi film from the days before he was even an indie darling. The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Take Out, which Baker co-wrote, co-directed, and co-edited with Shih-Ching Tsou in 2004, an early foray into tales of people scraping by on the margins.
Shot in a raw, vérité style, with Baker also handling cinematography, Take Out is an immersive slice-of-life about of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggling to get by in post-9/11 New York City. Facing violent retaliation from a loan shark, restaurant deliveryman Ming Ding has until nightfall to pay back the money he owes. As he frantically races against the clock, he encounters both crushing setbacks and moments of unexpected humanity. From this simple setup, Baker and Tsou fashion a kind of neorealist survival thriller of the everyday, shedding compassionate light on the too often overlooked lives and labor that keep New York ticking.
Even in his second feature, Baker’s intuitive feel for propulsive stories and the pressure-cooker of the urban gauntlet—which reached astounding new heights in Anora—was already clearly taking shape.