Girl, the directorial debut of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, is a beautiful film about a number of ugly subjects. In many respects, this is the determining factor of how one will respond to Girl. As one spends time with the film, it is indeed possible to come to resent its beauty, as if Shu Qi were trying to aestheticize her subject matter. When we see films about spousal abuse and parental neglect, they often employ the cinematic language of “kitchen sink realism,” showing a collection of poor, troubled people living in squalor. This tendency has at least two purposes. It makes a sociological argument, implying that poverty spawns violence almost as a matter of course. And it also serves to give form to the film, with its miserable surroundings operating as an objective correlative to the broken lives that populate them.
Girl does not do these things. Shu Qi, best known for her work in Hou Hsiao-hsien films, gives us a portrait of the bitter, violent childhood of Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying), the middle-school-aged child of Chuan (an actor known as 9m88), a hairdresser’s assistant. She has a younger sister (Lai Yu-Fei) who is much more confident than she is. And her father, Chiang (Roy Chiu), is a violent alcoholic who batters Chuan both physically and emotionally. (“I own you,” he tells his wife. “You can never leave me.”) But the environment Shu Qi gives us — at the hairdresser’s, on the bridge between home and school, or the family’s small apartment— has the visual luster we associate with the films of Hou, Edward Yang, and Wong Kar-wai. Pink nightlights illuminate mustard-colored walls. A blue oscillating fan anchors the foreground of compositions while the family sleeps and eats. The dim kitchen is patterned in teal and avocado. Even the banal school building is sunlit by banks of high windows. If this is a memoryscape, Hsiao-lee’s darkest times are recalled with the hard illumination of clarity.
There are several ways to think about Shu Qi’s directorial choices. First, of course, we can observe the similarity to Hou’s filmmaking, and how the actress herself once occupied his mise-en-scène as an illuminated object in her own right. After all, Shu Qi’s best-known role is in Millennium Mambo, in which she played a very different kind of girl, almost a human embodiment of the 21st century Zeitgeist. Hou taught his protegee that cinema is a kind of time machine, and that when we excavate memory for creative purposes, we almost always embellish it. But Girl may go deeper than this. Part of what this story conveys is the degree to which familial abuse often conceives of itself as private when in fact it is transparent, like an open window, visible to nearly everyone. Chuan’s pushy boss (Peggy Tseng) tells her she should get a divorce, “if not for you then for your children.” Hsiao-lee’s school nurse (Angel Lee) provides her with milk and bread because she knows the girl is malnourished. And even Chiang’s uncle (Bamboo Chen), who keeps him on at his garage out of duty to his dead brother, knows that his nephew is a worthless drunk.
So in a sense, Girl is about the open secret of family violence, and the way that people on the outside may try to help out in small ways while knowing they are powerless to intervene. It’s also about the cycle of abuse. Chuan simultaneously wants Hsiao-lee to study hard so her daughter doesn’t end up like her, while at the same time blaming Hsiao-lee for circumstances she had no part in. In one of Shu Qi’s smartest directorial moves, we occasionally see flashbacks to Chuan’s own childhood, with unexpected reverse-shots of young Chuan seeing present-day Hsiao-lee. The mother watches over the daughter, but her perspective is arrested in her own early traumas. When Chuan sees herself in Hsiao-lee, she only sees the worst parts of herself, and treats her daughter accordingly.
The visual style and nondiegetic inventiveness of Girl do not soft-pedal abuse, then. Rather, Shu Qi’s film serves as a gentle corrective to much of the Taiwanese New Wave, with its male-centered view of both nostalgia and cultural reckoning. What would films like A Brighter Summer Day or A Time to Live and a Time to Die look like if they were about young girls? They would be just as sumptuous, because that’s how we tend to remember our childhoods. But like Girl does, they would matter-of-factly depict the gendered divide. Skipping school and smoking and riding motorcycles is how boys form camaraderie and break away from the previous generation. When girls do this, they are in danger of becoming “fallen,” damaged goods who will only be able to take what men are willing to give them. Shu Qi rightly suggests that this just isn’t enough.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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