Left-Handed Girl

Beautiful film on mother, daughters and grandmother in modern day Taipei. Grand daughter growing up in this interesting triangle is what makes this film a wonderful story.

"Left-Handed Girl" is a funny and deeply heartfelt film showcasing the complexities of life in ways that feel fresh and exciting through a flawed multigenerational family trapped in the condemnation of societal roles that do not serve them. After closely collaborating with Sean Baker, either behind or in front of the camera for over twenty years, Taiwanese film producer, actress, and filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou makes her solo directorial debut with Left-Handed Girl. This isn’t her first foray behind the camera, as she co–helmed 2004’s Take Out with Baker, but Left-Handed Girl marks the first step for Tsou’s mark as an artist who shares the same humanist qualities as the Oscar-winning director, but with a greater emphasis on the relationship forged between the characters than the story directly responding to them. The student has now become the teacher with deeply moving film. When Tsou and Baker (who co-wrote and edited the film) attempt to interlink each story its three protagonists live through, Left-Handed Girl falls apart. What comes before this sequence feels so electric in capturing the routine lives of mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) and her daughters, I-Ann (Ma Shih-yuan) and I-Jinn (Nina Yeh), that one doesn’t necessarily need a story to coherently link all of their individual paths inside a drawn-out banquet scene with enough explosive reveals that transform its textured emotions into soap opera-like theatrics. That said, one can’t deny how major the movie feels beforehand, a bold artistic statement that assuredly introduces Shih Ching-Tsou as a voice to watch, especially in the realm of observational cinema, where the camera allows the audience to form a connection with the protagonists without the filmmaker necessarily inferring one way or another. It presents the three women as they are, flawed and vulnerable, while also highlighting their deepest, most human qualities, and lets the audience come up with their own conclusions and feelings towards them. This is done through impeccable, note-perfect performances from its three leads, yes, but mainly in how Tsou and cinematographers Ko-Chin Cheng and Tzu-Hao Kao always capture the protagonists at their level, through a jaw-dropping, immersive use of iPhones. When it follows I-Jinn careening around the streets of the Taipei Night Market, at her height, as we get to experience her perspective filled with joy, wonder, and curiosity about a world she doesn’t yet understand, or is at least trying to, the movie opens itself up so naturally that it doesn’t really need a “narrative” to carry its emotions. Of course, the fact that they are siblings and live in the same household will draw parallels to how each age group (youth, adolescence, and adulthood) sees the world, but each has its own individual stories worth observing at its simplest level. The iPhone cinematography isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s certainly effective at putting us in the shoes of each character, as their stories follow the same throughlines that Baker loves to highlight in his own films. There’s one particular image, shot from the perspective of the ailing father whom I-Ann has essentially disowned, that encapsulates a litany of feelings she has boiling inside of her, which could genuinely take your breath away. Traditional filmmaking wouldn’t convey the same authenticity as Tsou’s iPhone-photographed images do here. The colors are purposefully heightened at night, and the blurry digital grain a phone’s camera carries makes each frame feel as if they hold enough emotional truth for the audience to latch onto the characters and their individual – and often collective – plights. There’s a real sense of play in how both cinematographers use their central device, making us experience the Taiwan cityscape as a place we can touch, smell, and feel every ounce of its often claustrophobic, but occasionally beautiful, environment. It’s through this digitized language that we ultimately form a connection between the characters, only to have them break our hearts in a million pieces near its final section.