Oscar-winning director Sean Baker’s long-time producer Shih-Ching Tsou, who has additionally co-directed Take Out (2004) with him, makes her debut as a solo director with Left-Handed Girl. Set in Taipei and crammed with pop colors, brittle ladies and an lovely lady, the 2025 manufacturing is a winner.
Five-year-old I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), her mom Shu-Fen (Janet Tsai) and sister I-Jing (Nina Ye) relocate from the countryside to Taipei. Shu-Fen had left the town years in the past and has returned with little or no cash – she is estranged from her husband – and household secrets and techniques.
Shu-Fen units up a noodle stall at an evening market. I-Jing finds work at one of many Taiwanese capital’s many betel nut stands, the place engaging ladies are used to hawk merchandise. The sexualisation of younger ladies at workplaces – certainly one of Baker’s themes in his personal films – can also be one of many issues of Left-Handed Girl. I-Jing’s relationship along with her boyfriend and her precarious method recommend a girl residing on the sting.
Shu-Fen is fraught too, all the time worrying about cash and about maintaining appearances earlier than her wealthier dad and mom and sisters. Only younger I-Ann, who all the time has a prepared smile and a spring in her step, appears to be freed from worries, till her grandfather tells her that her left-handedness is forbidden by custom.
I-Ann’s use of the “Devil’s Hand”, aside from being an emblem of the orthodoxy that has broken her mom and sister, can also be the supply of adventures, together with one revolving round a meerkat. I-Ann’s innocence is a counterweight in addition to a liberating issue, bringing sunshine to the darkish corners and producing a smile even when conditions get uncontrolled.
Left-Handed Girl is on the market on Netflix. Baker and Tsou have co-written the heart-melting movie. Baker has additionally edited Left-Handed Girl, bringing to the narrative a well-known lived-in type that’s extremely attentive to the small moments and the massive revelations.
Taipei’s vibrant streets function a cheerful backdrop for the customarily emotionally heavy and bruising experiences of the grown-up ladies. Shot on an iPhone, the 109-minute film is an intimate, deeply felt chronicle of a household attempting to remain afloat whereas being buffeted by financial misery, household tensions and the burden of previous traumas.
The hand-held camerawork sucks viewers proper into the experiences of its principal characters. When the digicam is on Shih-Yuan Ma’s open and trusting face, it’s inconceivable to look away.
There are occasions when it seems that Ma has no concept that she is being filmed. Nina Ye is superb too because the cynical sibling strolling round with an open wound but in addition immense love for I-Ann.
