Sean Baker-Penned Drama Set in Taiwan

It is an unfortunate reality that in many cultures around the world, the left hand is taboo. Some traditions consider it unclean, others brand anyone who uses it to be impure on a physical and spiritual level. When I-Jing (Nina Ye), one of the protagonists in Shih-Ching Tsou‘s accomplished solo feature directorial debut, Left-Handed Girl, learns from her old-school grandfather (Akio Chen) that the left hand is associated with the devil himself in Taiwanese culture, the young girl spirals. I-Jing, who is left-handed, has just moved back to Taipei with her mother Chu-Fen (Janel Tsai) and older sister I-Ann (Shih-Yua Ma), and adjusting to city life is difficult enough without having to worry about an evil hand. 

More than 20 years after co-directing Take Out with Sean Baker, Tsou, who has produced many of the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s projects, returns behind the camera to helm a modest and entertaining story about three generations of women making their way in contemporary Taipei. The strengths of this slender film, which Tsou co-wrote with Baker, stem from its authentic rendition of daily life in a bustling metropolis. 

As in Take Out, Tsou relishes in the details that constitute an existence. What does survival in places so obviously propelled by capital look like on a financial and social level? With its frenetic, fly-on-the-wall style, Take Out reflected New York’s grittiness from the perspective of a delivery man scrounging together cash to pay back an impatient loan shark. The realities of Taipei are no less harsh in Left-Handed Girl, but Tsou approaches her meditation differently. The film brims with tenderly observed moments, whether stemming from the makeshift community formed by vendors at the night market where Chu-Fen opens a noodle shop or the claustrophobia of the flat that she and her daughters call home.

With Baker as her editor and Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao as cinematographers, Tsou constructs a grammar for how perspective changes a city’s mood. When the camera is low, trailing I-Jing as she weaves around the stalls in the bustling market, Taipei becomes almost effervescent, coming alive in a different way when I-Ann rides her scooter through the streets, her dark hair blowing in the wind like a cape. 

Left-Handed Girl might be a story of hustling in the city, but it’s not a down-trodden tale of suffering. Understated humor and obvious heart undergird each scene. A handful of performances — especially from Ma as the mercurial I-Ann, Ye as the charming tyke and Xin-Yan Chao as their wheeling-and-dealing grandmother — round out the intimacy of this considered portrait.

If there’s one road bump in Left-Handed Girl, it’s the surprising way the director deploys melodrama near the end of the film. The big twist comes a touch too late — leaving the movie no time to deal with the ramifications of key revelations — and lands with an awkward thud. Still, there’s much to admire in Left-Handed Girl, especially in how Tsou shapes a compelling and deeply immersive multi-generational story of survival. 

After that conversation with her grandfather, I-Jiang tries to use her right hand. The desperate adjustment proves too challenging (scenes of I-Jiang struggling to draw and eat inspire pity) so the elementary school student embraces her doomed life. Whenever she wants to do something morally dubious, like shoplifting from different stalls in the night market, she uses her left hand and blames the devil.

Scenes of the child’s life recall the exuberant innocence of Baker’s The Florida Project. Initially, I-Jiang pilfers small things, like bracelets and little toys, but as she becomes more aware of her family’s dire financial situation she tries to swipe more valuable items. Ye’s performance balances the depressing weight of this curse with the thrill of evading accountability. She nails the confusion of a child coming into their own sense of morality.  

While I-Jiang quietly negotiates her cursed hand, her sister I-Ann, a svelte and sharp-tongued teenager, slinks around the city trying to make a living. The young woman showed academic promise at her rural high school but, as she later tells a group of former classmates, restrictive finances made it impossible for her to attend university. I-Ann now works at a betel nut stand where she packs and sells the mild stimulant to shady figures who pull up on bikes. She’s also sleeping with her boss, a dishonest and sort of dopey figure. 

The action in Left-Handed Girl gets going after Chu-Fen receives news of her ex-husband’s death and, feeling duty-bound, decides to pay for his funeral instead of keeping up with rent on her stall in the night market. Chu-Fen tries to ask her own parents for money, but a history of indebtedness makes them reluctant to bail her out again. With few options, Chu-Fen finds herself in a precarious situation. Johnny (Brando Huang), her gregarious neighbor at the night market, offers to help but Chu-Fen refuses his assistance and flirtatious advances.

A significant plot point in Tsou’s film concerns I-Ann’s fractious relationship with her mother, whom she views as emotionally weak for still supporting her ex-husband. Tension in the pair’s relationship builds in each scene as mother and daughter calcify the heartbreaking distance between them. 

Ma and Tsai give strong performances that cast the dynamic as one not of scorn but of regretful misunderstanding. As these two older women navigate the meaning of terse responses and cutting looks, I-Jiang tries to carve out her own space within the family and across the city. One does wish that the youngest member of this clan was shaded with a bit more complexity, especially near the end when a surprise confessional threatens already fragile bonds. But that doesn’t take away from the strength of Left-Handed Girl, a constellation of absorbing stories that deftly highlight the social and economic realities faced by three generations of women in Taipei.