WCS 2012: Chinese Takeaway (M)

This charming odd-couple comedy draws on two resources that have made recent Argentinian movies so appealing to audiences around the world: a nimble, character-based screenplay – and actor Ricardo Darín. In Chinese Takeaway he’s Roberto, a Buenos Aires shopkeeper clinging with comic exactitude to the routines that keep him single and make his life so gratifyingly safe. Enter Jun, an amiable young Chinese man mysteriously abandoned in the city without a word of Spanish and clearly in need of the kindness of strangers. Doing the decent thing, Roberto finds his social world expanding in all manner of inconvenient and unforeseeable ways. If the recipe is tried and true, the ingredients are sweet, salty and fresh.