Butler's Cinema Scene

“CHINESE TAKE-AWAY”  My rating: B (Opens Nov. 2 at the Glenwood Arts)

93 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Chinese Take-Away” opens with one of the weirdest images you’ll see in movies this year.

On an idyllic lake in China two young lovers sit in a boat. The boy has a couple of wedding rings…he’s preparing to propose. And then a cow falls from the sky, shattering the boat and, in the process, the kid’s life.

Next thing you know we’re in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the tiny hardware store operated by Roberto (Ricardo Darin).  He’s a middle-aged grump, sour and solitary, obsessed with making sure that when his suppliers sell him a box of 500 screws that there are actually 500 screws in the box.  He spends a lot of time counting screws…that and collecting tiny blown glass animals for a shrine to his late mother, who died giving birth to him..

Sebastian Borensztein’s comedy with a heart throws together the truculent Roberto with a visitor, Jun (Ignacio Huang), that same young man from the comic/tragic prologue. Jun has traveled to Argentina to live with an uncle who immigrated there years before. But the uncle has moved out of the city to parts unknown and the childlike Jun, who speaks not a word of Spanish, must throw himself upon the comfort of strangers — or at least on the comfort of the strange Roberto.

That you can see where “Chinese Take-Away” is going doesn’t really diminish its pleasures. Roberto tries repeatedly to ditch his unwelcome guest, but his conscience always gets the best of him. For his part, Jun does what he can to be useful to his benefactor. And his presence does have one upside…it shows Roberto’s off-and-on girl (Muriel Santa Ana) that he’s not such a curmudgeon after all.

The joy in all this is the balancing of Roberto’s surly pessimism against Jun’s sad innocence. Together they make a pretty complete human being.

| Robert W. Butler