Usually telling the end of a film is considered a spoiler. In the case of Argentinian director Sebastián Borensztein, 'Chinese Take-Out' ('Un cuento cino' in the Spanish version) it would be a spoiler to tell how it begins. I actually watched the usual late comers to the cinema hall and wondered whether the film experience is really complete for those folks who entered even only two minutes late after the start of the projection. So, I won't make the mistake of revealing the start of this quite charming feel-good film, I will just say it's quite relevant.

The film tells the story of a grumpy mid-aged owner of a hardware shop in Argentina named Roberto who lives alone, refusing almost any relation with other human beings excepting his suppliers and customers (well, even with these ones only to the point where they do not walk on his toes). He is a good and decent man, and a very bad communicator at the same time. The last thing he needs in life is the appearance of a young Chinese man, Jun, frightened and disoriented, who looks for his uncle in the search for somebody to support him in finding a new way in a new country and who has no-one to rely on but Roberto whom he met accidentally. None of them speaks any word in the language of the other, and each hides traumas from the bast that justify their own barriers in communication. The whole movie is about finding ways to communicate and building a friendship that will help both in overcoming the hurdles of life.

Films about overcoming cultural gaps doubled by barriers of language and making human communication possible despite of them have been made in the past, the one I happen to remember is the Israeli 'Noodle', which was telling the story of a stewardess who finds herself taking care of an abandoned Chinese kid. What makes the story different in 'Un quento cino' are the background stories of the two heroes and the fact that Ricardo Darin and Ignacio Huang are right on spot for the two leading roles. One of the nice ideas of the film is that Jun (Huang) does not really speak one word of Spanish during the whole film, he speaks Chinese, but no translation is available. The language gap is more than a emotional trick or a comic pretext in this film. It is the very glue upon which the relationship and eventually the friendship between the two characters is based upon. Although it is aimed eventually to be a feel-good movie (and succeeds to be so) 'Un quento cino' avoids falling into cheap melodrama because of the discrete humor built upon the day-to-day situations, also based on the fact that in the absence of words the characters need to use gestures which to some extent remind the pantomime style of the early cinema comedies. A discrete and pleasant film.

Accidents can change people as this beautifully crafted film from Argentina written and directed by Sebastián Borensztein proves. It is a lovely mixture of fantasy (the fantasy is actually based on a true story) and the reality of how immigrants to any country adjust and the need for the kindness of strangers.

The film opens in a beautiful scene in Fucheng, China where a young couple about to marry are on a picturesque little boat in the middle of a river, celebrating their future. Suddenly a cow drops out of the sky, smashes the boat, kills the girl and the young man Jun (Ignacio Huang) survives.

Jump immediately to Buenos Aires where we meet the bitter and methodic Roberto as a lonely owner of a hardware store. Roberto (Ricardo Darín) collects strangely bizarre worldwide happenings he finds in the many newspapers to which he subscribes and pastes them in an album as a hobby. The man who delivers the stack of newspapers has a sister-in-law Mari (Muriel Santa Ana) who has an unrequited love for Roberto, but Roberto is always evasive. One day, while watching the landing of airplanes at the airport, Roberto sees a Chinese lad named Jun being thrown out of a taxi: he helps the man to stand up. Jun does not speak Spanish and shows a tattoo with an address on his arm. Roberto heads to the address of the tattoo with Jun and discover that the place belonged to Jun's uncle that sold it three and half years ago. Roberto goes with Jun to the police station (where Roberto slugs the desk policeman for insisting that Jun spend the night in jail), to the China's embassy and to a Chinese neighborhood to seek out his uncle but it is a fruitless search. Roberto sees the only option is to allow Jun in his house ('for a certain number of days only!') and after a series of incidents, he finds a Chinese take-out delivery boy to translate for Jun.

Roberto explains to Jun through the translator that life is absurd, does not have any sense, and shares his hobby of the news he had collected including one about some men stealing cows in China with a plane and how a group of peasants follows and shoots the plane in flight, the plane's back door is opened, and two cows are dropped, one of them killing a girlfriend in a boat, who happens to be Jun's, as the translator then explains to Roberto. Roberto then shares his childhood reasons for his current world view and they are dramatic. A series of incidents occurs in which Jun is able to payback the kindness of Roberto, but the major impact is the relationship that forms between Roberto and Jun, a relationship without language communication but with so much more. The small accidental ironies include the Latin American belief that what falls from the sky is usually a sign of good luck, and the final 'gift' Jun leaves Roberto is a drawing of a cow's head on the back of Roberto's store - the space Jun ad cleaned for his room and board.

This is a delicate and very tender story and succeeds because of the sterling performances by Ricardo Darín, Ignacio Huang, and Muriel Santa Ana. Perhaps it doesn't 'take a village' to make changes, but the reciprocity of two disparate people thrown together by fate certainly does.

Grady Harp