Take Out meets The Florida Project in a Shih-Ching Tsou & Sean Baker collaboration that's full of lively real-life energy and saturated colours. Tsou and Baker co-write, with the former directing and the latter editing, and extract the sweetest (and cutest) performance from Nina Ye, playing a young kid named I-Jing who's told (by her orthodox grandpa) that using the left hand leads to the devil's work. Her mom Shu-Fen (an excellent Janel Tsai) runs a noodle stand in the bustling Taipei night market, while her sister I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) is an angsty teenager who works as a 'betel nut beauty.' Another key character here is Johnny (Brando Huang), a hawker whose shop is adjacent to the noodle shop, and gradually grows to be a spirited presence in the womens' lives.
Films shot on the iPhone (Boyle's 28 Years Later, Soderbergh's Unsane, Baker's own Tangerine, and recently Neil Burger's Inheritance) have a unique aesthetic to them. A big chunk of the film revolves around I-Jing's little antics with the camera zooming in on her adorably expressive face, and coupled with Taipei's beautifully lived-in settings, the film is a sight to behold, even on smaller screens. The candid beauty of East Asian (and South East Asian, for that matter) countries is just absorbing as hell. The more you've travelled to these places, the more you can relate.
Drama keeps brewing in the household between the three ladies, with money, integrity, and even the family tree being called into question. All three get well-etched characters and arcs. The climactic culmination even brings an unexpected reveal, but life keeps moving. The writing treats ACCEPTANCE as a true virtue, and sometimes in life, that's exactly how it is. The scene where I-Jing and I-Ann go back together to return I-Jing's stolen goods is SO SWEET.. might be my favourite scene in a film all year.
