In the tradition of both cinéma vérité and Italian neorealist style, it seems that the central image of the bicycle within a bleak urbanized environment has become somewhat of a motif. Dating back to De Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves and popping up more recently in Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle, it has once again seemingly appeared in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s social realist work, Take Out.
To not rely heavily upon comparative analysis, I’ll be brief. The continuing motif is obvious but probably irrelevant for the most part. Take Out has little to nothing to do with De Sica’s earlier work aside from genre and narrative similarities. If anything, it bears more in common with its Sixth Generation contemporaries across the globe such as Li Yang’s Blind Shaft or possibly Lou Ye’s Suzhou River.
In this manner there is a deep interest in its almost transnational cinematic relationship that seemingly parallels the subject matter of the film. Ming Ding, an illegal Chinese immigrant like most of the characters on screen, is struggling to not only earn a living, but save enough money to send back home to his awaiting family. His supposed frustration over this difficulty leads to borrowing money from a loan shark that he simply can’t pay back.
