Director Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl (now on Netflix) arrives with the muscle of newly minted Oscar honoree Sean Baker – the filmmaker behind Anora – behind it. Tsou and Baker are longtime collaborators; they co-directed 2004’s Take Out and Tsou has producer credit on Baker’s Tangerine, Red Rocket, and The Florida Project. Their most recent collaboration is the screenplay for this story about a single mother and her daughters scraping by in the heart of Taipei. The Florida Project is a clear reference point, as Left-Handed Girl frequently clings to the point-of-view of an oft-undersupervised young girl learning the complex dynamics of the people and culture around her, but it takes a fascinating melodramatic turn down the stretch.
The Gist: Everybody looks, well, weary. Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) is 40ish, with the weight of many more years in her eyes. Her 20ish daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) views so much of her existence through narrowed, angry eyes, carrying herself like a sullen, rebellious teenager. And little I-Jing (Nina Ye), at five years old, thankfully swallows up the world with upbeat curiosity. They’ve just moved back to Taipei, to an apartment that’s smaller than they expected, and they’ve been gone long enough that Shu-Fen’s parents (Xin-Yan Chao and Akio Chen) are meeting I-Jing for the first time. There’s a cloud of depression over these three women/girls, and it often dictates the tone.
What happened, then? We’re privy to a few details and left to color the rest with suppositions. Shu-Fen is divorced – and suddenly obligated to pay her cretin ex-husband’s medical and burial bills after he falls gravely ill. She’s just opened a noodle stand in a bustling night market, which isn’t the type of living that’ll easily accommodate such debt. I-Ann can’t interact with her mother without her simmering contempt boiling over; she rebels by getting a job as a scantily clad saleswoman of hallucinogenic betel nuts, threatening to earn more money than Shu-Fen. Meanwhile, I-Jing attends kindergarten during the day and hangs out in the market at night, at best moderately supervised by Shu-Fen. The girl often wanders off, through the mazelike assemblage of food stands, merchandise tables and carnival games, exploring unaccompanied. Sometimes the carnival-barker type salesman of gimmicky tchotchkes at the neighboring stand, Johnny (Brando Huang), shows her kindness or gives her gifts – he seems to be sweet on Shu-Fen.
Against this backdrop, Shu-Fen, I-Ann and I-Jing contend with the stuff of… well, life. Shu-Fen inherits a pet meerkat from her ex, much to I-Jing’s delight. I-Ann joylessly bangs the married owner of the betel nut stand in the backroom, and goes to a party with former classmates who attended college while she dropped out of high school. Shu-Fen sets aside her weariness for one evening of drinking with the well-intentioned Johnny, who ends up spending the night. They all visit Shu-Fen’s parents, where Grandma gives off an air of psychological instability while Grandpa admonishes I-Jing for being left-handed. “It’s the devil’s hand!” he insists, invoking ancient superstition. So I-Jing lets that hand take over while she wanders the market, stealing the toys and trinkets she can’t afford to buy.
Photo: Netflix
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The gritty style and child’s POV of The Florida Project meets the eccentricities of South Asian culture we saw in The Farewell.
Performance Worth Watching: The trio of leads are equally adept at carrying the drama here – all are exemplary – but without Ye’s naturalistic performance, Left-Handed Girl might lose its ability to hypnotize us with its rhythmic storytelling.
Sex And Skin: Some brief partial nudity during a sex scene.
Photo: Netflix
Our Take: It’s no surprise to learn that Left-Handed Girl is just as visually well-considered, tonally vivid and dramatically potent as Baker’s best work. It’s a stylistic sibling of The Florida Project, which also focused on psychologically and economically burdened mothers and their too-often undersupervised daughters, but Left-Handed Girl is firmly entrenched in a Taiwanese culture where women carry significant burdens of responsibility while men feast off the bounty of their labor – in the same house, even. Note how Grandma frets about her illegal business of distributing phony passports, while Grandpa watches television and gruffly enforces absurd notions about the evil of left-handedness, essentially setting up I-Jing to feel deeply flawed and, in a sense, crippled. Shu-Fen’s interactions with her siblings further underscore the dynamic, with Grandma choosing to further pad her son’s comfortable lifestyle over helping Shu-Fen cover the rent at the noodle stand.
The film truly comes alive in the heavily saturated neon of the night market, capturing the bustle, and the ongoing hustle that fuels it. It’s Taipei’s vibrant, humanist working class, and a lesser film would ply it with threats to I-Jing’s well-being as she wanders its tight corridors and tables full of plastic goods, instead of well-meaning folk trying to earn an honest wage. Take Johnny, whose good heart radiates kindness toward our protagonists; Shu-Fen’s hesitant to accept his help, and her distrust of men is understandable considering who’s been present in her life to this point. I-Ann has learned young how to shut down and shut out – her de-facto catchphrase is “None of your business,” spat like venom at her mother. The lives of Shu-Fen, I-Ann and I-Jing are where cultural tradition meets progress, superstition and desperation.
The climactic sequence, set at Grandma’s birthday party with extended family assembled, is something else. Some might see it engaging in tonal warfare with the rest of the film, but I assert it as a necessary reinforcement of the film’s central idea: That keeping secrets is poisonous, and only further asserts patriarchal superiority in this culture. The sequence introduces the idea of an older woman “losing face” among her familial community, and finds some compelling ironies introduced earlier in the film transformed into potent dramatic reveals. Smarter still is the denouement, which depicts a reprieve from the gloom that dictated nearly all preceding scenes: Life goes on, problems are worked through rather than solved, and the world’s weight doesn’t feel quite so oppressive in the wake of freshly revealed truths.
Our Call:Left-Handed Girl is of a piece with Tsou and Baker’s previous work – and that’s very much a good thing. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
