First-time solo director Shih-Ching Tsou has been working with filmmaker Sean Baker since the early aughts, beginning with a movie they co-directed, the 2004 Take Out. After that, she produced his 2012 Starlet, 2015 Tangerine, 2016 short film Snowbird, 2017 The Florida Project, and 2021 Red Rocket. Making her debut behind the camera on her own, with Left-Handed Girl, Tsou nevertheless continues to partner with Baker, with whom she co-wrote the script. It is, as always, a winning creative collaboration.
Set in Taipei, Taiwan, Left-Handed Girl centers on the small nuclear unit of mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai, Another Woman), teenage daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), and much younger baby sister I-Jing (Nina Ye). The trio move back to the capital after some alluded-to recent hardships, where Shu-Fen opens a noodle stand in a local night market. With her own parents and sisters nearby, Shu-Fen can at least count on some occasional babysitting support from grandma and grandpa.
Which is good, because money is tight and the monthly rent for her space at the market does not come cheap. Unfortunately, Shu-Fen’s father holds on to long-since-discarded generational prejudice against left-handed people, and I-Jing is very much one such person. He constantly berates her for something that she cannot help, calling the offending extremity her “devil hand.” It’s no surprise that she begins to act out, blaming her misbehavior on that which is beyond her control.
Still, she’s adorable, so it’s hard for anyone to bear a grudge. And, in a clever plot twist, her ill-advised actions will actually prove helpful. But that comes later. In the meantime, there are additional bits of drama involving I-Ann’s job—and the reasons why she neither finished high school nor went to university—and Shu-Fen’s potential romance with Johnny (Brando Huang, Big), the vendor next to her, not to mention the strange business shenanigans of the grandmother. We see most of it, if not all, through I-Jing’s point of view, the fluid camera (a 4K iPhone) gliding over surfaces at a low angle that heighten the reality through a visually enhanced sense of innocence.
The storytelling and the performances (with Huang and Ye the standouts of the excellent ensemble), coupled with the simultaneously precise and loose cinematography, make the narrative come alive in ways both specific and universal. This is a highly dysfunctional household that still manages to unite when it counts, with community sometimes more important than blood. Each character is made three-dimensional, their flaws and strengths on full display, and many of them surprise us, Tsou and Baker refusing to choose easy answers to thorny questions. The result is a fresh take on the age-old exploration of family and relationships, moving to its core.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.