Chinese Take-Away movie review (2012)
One day a taxi squeals to a halt, and the driver throws out his passenger, a young Chinese man. Roberto is offended. This confirms his belief that all taxi drivers are jerks. The young man speaks no Spanish but expresses himself in a torrent of anguished Mandarin. He has an address written on his arm. Roberto gives him a lift to that address, but the current tenant says she bought the house a few years ago from a Chinese man. She has no forwarding address.
That is the most Roberto can be expected to do, and he leaves the young man at a bus stop to find his own way. He goes home, a downpour begins, and he cannot help himself but must drive out to the bus stop, pick up the stranger and bring him home. This is already an unthinkable breach of his habits.
Roberto is played by the soulful Argentine actor Ricardo Darin, who you may remember from "The Secret in Their Eyes." He is fiftyish, unassumingly mustached, has weary eyes, is fed up most of the time. His guest, named Jun (Ignacio Huang), is a smooth-faced youth who is baffled to find himself adrift in Argentina, and whose response is cordial passivity. Neither man is skilled at communicating without words.
The middle sections of Sebastian Borensztein's film involve Roberto's ineffectual warnings that Jun cannot stay, as Jun listens uncomprehendingly. Using a Chinese take-away deliveryman as a translator, they learn that Jun is searching for his uncle. Visits to the police station, the Chinese embassy and Chinatown are fruitless. The two men share silent meals, and Jun does some odd jobs around the store.
We meet Mari (Muriel Santa Ana), who is visiting the relative who delivers Roberto's standing orders for countless newspapers. Roberto and Mari share sort of a history, shown in a brief and startling flashback. Mari makes no secret that she likes him. Roberto doesn't want to be liked. As nearly as possible, he wants to be left alone, passing his time counting screws, insulting customers and scanning the newspapers for items about people dying in ridiculous ways.
It is hardly possible to suggest how involving this story becomes. One can see how it could have been a comedy, but this is no comedy. Ricardo Darin's performance evokes the solitary isolation of Roberto and his almost tangible fear of knowing or being known. He isn't cruel or hostile; he acts out of some deep apprehension. Nor is Jun the sort of man we might imagine, ingratiating and accommodating. He projects no expectations at all, and passively accepts all of Roberto's actions and decisions.
