Left-Handed Girl is a movie of debts: of money owed to hospitals and landlords, of time owed to family, of the obligations of history. For the five-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye), debt lies in tradition and superstition. “The left hand is the devil’s hand,” I-Jing’s grandfather scolds while he watches her scribble, drolly parroting a time-worn Taiwanese myth and instructing his granddaughter to pick up a crayon in her right fist. Ever the literal child, I-Jing sees the admonishment less as a rebuke than a discovery. The devil is alive and at her side; who knows what it might make her do.
I-Jing is growing up in Taipei under her mother, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), and older sister, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), a girl approaching 20 whose firebrand rebellion draws the walls of their apartment closer in every day. Money is tight for the family: Shu-Fen scrapes by running a noodle stand in a neon-drenched downtown night market, where she often makes her daughters help by washing dishes and taking orders. When that’s not enough to pay the bills, I-Ann takes a job at a nearby bodega selling betel nuts to bikers looking to catch a buzz. Eager to spite her mother with a bigger paycheck, I-Ann hooks up with the shop’s owner — a married man whose own baggage teeters ominously over I-Ann’s life and family. And, with mother and sister otherwise busy, little I-Jing lets the devil drive her fingertips: first through petty theft, then through wryly comic tragedy.
Left-Handed Girl is Shih-Ching Tsou’s debut feature and the latest output of a decades-long collaboration with the film’s cowriter and editor, Sean Baker. Tsou met the Anora director in the late ’90s while studying at NYC’s New School, where the pair bonded over Southeast Asian cinema — then a rarity among Western audiences — and Dogme ’95 films. The latter collective’s doctrinal asceticism helped to guide Tsou and Baker’s first joint feature, 2004’s Take Out, a verité day in the life of a Chinese immigrant in post-9/11 New York. Since then, Tsou has lingered in the background of the better half of Baker’s filmography, producing his biggest hits through 2021’s Red Rocket and filling in whenever a camera operator or bit player might be needed.
Left-Handed Girl, which Tsou and Baker wrote in 2010 and only successfully funded after Baker’s recent critical successes, is decidedly more buoyant than anything Lars Von Trier might have championed in his salad days. But the new-wave naturalism that Tsou and Baker fostered in films from Take Out to Tangerine is as present as ever. Tsou’s debut is shot entirely on iPhone, and its inch-away immediacy recalls the camerawork of Anthony Dod Mantle in his own Dogme days. It’s a thrill to see that visual intensity lent to such an empathetic project. Left-Handed Girl is largely told from a child’s perspective, and the lens follows I-Jing at her own three feet, her face filling the frame like a birthday balloon. When scenes shift toward I-Ann, the world grows accordingly: life’s boundaries blossom beyond the night market and apartment to find a city as rife with excitement as it is the ups and downs of a dollar earned.
Shu-Fen, a woman in her early 40s with two mouths to feed, brings the camera to a steady sobriety. Her own family isn’t the only factor driving her to long shifts at the noodle stand. She’s agreed to take on the funeral costs for her late ex-husband, a man whose past inspires joint-quaking vitriol from I-Ann — and little respect for her mother as she continues to foot his bills. Shu-Fen can’t seem to catch a break from her own mother, either, who chides her daughter’s parenting and bank account even as she herself runs a fake passport business out of her apartment. Four generations of women are bound by family and history and tradition under the demands of late capitalism; it amounts to a realist portrait of Taipei at the intersection of longing and survival.
In the shadow of Anora, it’s difficult to separate Sean Baker’s presence from Shih-Ching Tsou’s project. Baker carved a name for himself piloting bootstrapped and blood-rich indie grit that often serves as a Trojan horse for near operatic melodrama — see The Florida Project’s Disney turn or Red Rocket’s Gulf Coast Lolita. That sort of velveteen sensationalism can provoke Left-Handed Girl to stumble. There’s a narrative convenience guiding the troubles scattered across the family’s generations to the same nexus, and when they finally converge, their individual weights are sacrificed in favor of a grand tear-jerker. The scene — a pot boiled over at the matriarch’s birthday celebration — is a rare, plasticine polyp on an otherwise searingly authentic pastiche of the perspectives that stitch together a real life.
But then again, who wouldn’t get bleary-eyed against four generations of women consistently beating capitalism’s odds? The debts each woman carries bear the interest of loneliness, the private sorrow of knowing a bill runs deeper than an empty pocket. If a disapproving mother or wild-eyed sister can’t always cover the tab, the small comforts of tagging along on a vespa ride or sharing cups of noodles with dishpan hands can at least float you through the following day. Left-Handed Girl occasionally turns the dial too far in search of catharsis, but it is joyously sober toward the light that cracks through the struggle to make ends meet.
DIRECTOR: Shih-Ching Tsou; CAST: Ma Shih-yuan, Janel Tsai, Nina Yeh, Brando Huang, Alvin Lin; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: November 14; STREAMING: November 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
Comments are closed.