When Sean Baker’s career-high poverty drama The Florida Project locally premiered at New Orleans Film Fest in 2017, I was surprised that the screening included a Q&A with the movie’s producer, Shih-Ching Tsou.  Although Tsou does not enjoy the same name recognition as her longtime creative partner, I immediately recognized her as the donut counter cashier from Baker’s previous picture – his breakout hit Tangerine.  Listening to her talk about the creative & financial decisions behind The Florida Project‘s production made it clear she was a substantial player in the success of Baker’s directorial career, and that she had been his main collaborator since long before their movies received red-carpet film festival rollouts.  A recent Criterion Collection restoration of Baker’s early, scrappy service industry drama Take Out highlighted the extent of their collaboration even more starkly.  It’s the one instance where Shih-Ching Tsou was so involved in the daily filming of a project that she & Baker were listed as co-directors instead of being rigidly relegated to director & producer.  It’s an interesting curio within the context of Baker’s career anyway, since it’s the only story I’ve seen him tell outside his usual pet subject of poverty-line sex work.  Still, it’s even more interesting for the way it pushes what Tsou brings to her creative partnership with Baker to the forefront, since it was largely made with a two-person crew.

If it hadn’t been an early-style precursor to the greater things Baker & Tsou accomplished in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, it’s unlikely Take Out would be remembered much at all.  It’s a pretty straightforward cinema verité labor drama, most notable for its chump-change budget & documentary sensibilities.  The most interest it might have to audiences unfamiliar with the trajectory of Sean Baker’s career is the authentic snapshot it captures of the daily operations of a Chinese food delivery kitchen in a post-9/11 NYC.  Baker & Tsou spent weeks filming the front-of-house customer service & back-of-house food production of an authentic Chinese take-out counter before writing a sparse screenplay that could be staged in its sweaty, cramped walls.  The customers at the counter are real New Yorkers waiting on their take-out orders; the customers who accept deliveries at their apartments were cast through Craigslist and improvised their interactions with the central, doomed delivery guy.  Most importantly, the incredibly charismatic woman working the take-out counter, Wang-Thye “Big Sister” Lee, is documented performing her actual, natural work persona, providing enough priceless interactions with the real people of New York that it’s almost frustrating the movie wasn’t reworked as a full documentary instead of a mixed-media docudrama.  Instead, Baker & Tsou reshaped these authentic transactions into a tidy, barebones crime drama, which likely helped land it the film festival distribution that kickstarted their career.

After harvesting enough B-roll of real-life kitchen drama, Tsou & Baker wrote a fictional drama about a food delivery worker’s frantic day-long scramble to repay borrowed cash, staged within the same restaurant.  He has until the end of his shift to scrape together $800 in donations & tips or his debt to the gangsters who helped fund his US immigration will be doubled, a consequence they make brutally clear by hobbling his body with a hammer.  This desperation pushes him to work grueling hours biking through a rainstorm, performing gratitude to shit-heel customers on what’s presumably the worst day of his life.  Of course, it’s near impossible to get ahead on his own under those conditions, only picking up $1 here or $2 there in tips as the deadline quickly approaches.  There’s no music underscoring the tension of this low-level crime drama, just the low hum of kitchen equipment and NYC rain.  Although the story being told about the risks & pitfalls of undocumented immigration is a politically pointed one, it often feels a little forced & tidy compared to what’s otherwise such an authentic look at the daily lives of undocumented kitchen workers in major US cities.  In the few movies they’ve made together since, Baker & Tsou have greatly improved the balance between those two impulses – pushing the fictional drama of their semi-documentary films to even more artificial extremes while simultaneously making them feel natural to the real-world environments they’re staged in.  Take Out can’t help but feel like an early test run for greater work by comparison, but it’s still successful Independent Filmmaking on its own terms.

This early Tsou & Baker collaboration was made for $3,000 on rented mini-DV cameras in just one month’s time.  Unlike the movie’s central characters and his co-director, Baker does not speak Mandarin Chinese, so he relied on Tsou to translate any improvised deviations from their script to help keep the rushed production on track.  The handheld cameras frame the world they document & synthesize in a grotesque dinge, fixating on poverty-porn details like cockroach infestations, curled linoleum tiles, and the yellowed hues of fluorescent lights.  Despite the uniform hideousness of low-budget digital filmmaking in that era, the food being served in the central kitchen location still looks damn good; the fried rice might read as electric green onscreen, but it’s topped with a visibly juicy half of chicken that’ll have you reaching for the pile of take-out menus in your own apartment.  The equipment & financial limitations that shaped the production were obviously less than ideal, but they forced Tsou & Baker to work in cramped proximity in a way that solidified their joint filmmaking style that’s only led to increasingly greater work since.  From the outside looking in, I get the sense that Tsou is still just as much of a driving force in their creative output as Baker, even though she doesn’t get onscreen credit as his co-director.  At least, there’s nothing especially glaring about the filmmaking & economic ideas of Take Out that you won’t find in their more recent pictures; it’s just that now professional actors like Willem Dafoe deliver their dialogue instead of Craigslist randos, for better more than for worse.

-Brandon Ledet