by Sebastien Smith
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Film Poster
Warning: This review discusses domestic abuse and suicide ideation.
FIRST THERE was American Girl in 2021. Now we have Left-handed Girl, and, naturally, the succinctly titled Girl—two more coming-of-age dramas centred around young women (and the mothers who raise them). But where the former film is about a Taiwanese diasporic family returning from the US, these two new films are purely grounded in Taipei.
Shu Qi, director and writer of Girl, is best known for her acting work in the 90s and 00s with Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien (City of Sadness, Millennium Mambo). In the Hou-directed Three Takes, Shu’s character says, “Writing is a gentle feeling.” Surely writing about her turbulent upbringing for a directorial debut was anything but gentle; this deeply personal project uncovers the life of a teenage girl growing up in an abusive environment. “I look back at my family of origin,” Shu said ahead of the film’s Hong Kong premiere, ‘In that house, there was domestic violence.’ With that in mind, Girl is an honest but uneven attempt to trace the scars of adolescence.
Girl takes us into the head of teenage Lin Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) as she navigates the minefield of home. Her drunken father physically abuses Lin and her mother, and her mother takes things out on Lin. And so, Girl is a character study with a naturalist approach to storytelling; instead of a developing plot, Lin’s arc comes into focus through her hopes and fears.
This narrative choice adds depth to the film, but sometimes causes jarring stylistic shifts. Lin’s escapes into nature—crawling through woods and grasslands to escape her home life—are dream-like, as if shot for the fantasy genre. But later, the character’s suicide ideation in those same woods unravels through psycho-horror-inspired Dutch angles and shadows. These scenes are striking, but too much so; their vividness sometimes overwhelms a film that struggles to settle on a cohesive visual language.
Even so, the film falls flat when it takes us out of Lin’s head and cuts away to her father’s story. He is granted more narrative space than either the director or the actor knows what to do with. Played by Roy Chiu, he works at a motorcycle garage for his dead father’s brother. Beyond that, the film is not interested in explaining his arc of alcoholism and abuse. Chiu doesn’t have much to work with and plays a bad hand badly: his performance is one-note and exaggerated, often stumbling the fine line between playing drunk and, well, just stumbling.
Yet, for all its flaws and tough subject matter, Girl remains a highly watchable effort, thanks to its two female leads, Bai and Joanne Tang Yu-chi. Tang in particular understands the complexity of her role as the mother character — a woman trapped in the dual roles of victim and perpetrator.
Shu’s childhood memories in Taipei in the 1980s clearly informed her writing and directing of “Girl”. But for a semi-autobiographical film, it curiously avoids fully establishing a sense of time or place. The film feels set in a hazy, borderless city that could be almost anywhere in pre-smartphone Asia. Was she aiming for something that feels universal and unmoored from any specific location?
Left-handed Girl, on the other hand (forgive me), is a true Taipei story. That it was shot entirely on the iPhone is not just a gimmick; it allows the director, Shih-Ching Tsou, to narrate the city through the eyes (and often at the eye levels) of the film’s central characters.
Shu-fen (Janel Tsai), a financially and emotionally burned-out mother, is moving her two daughters back to Taipei after her husband ran off. She finds the family a cramped apartment, and she sets up a night market stall. In its first half, Left-handed Girl takes a slice-of-life rhythm similar to Girl, but anecdotes of each character are spliced together. The elder daughter, I-ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), works as a betel nut girl for sleazy customers and an even sleazier boss, while the utterly charming 5-year-old I-jing (Nina Ye) settles into her new home and gets into trouble.
The splicing approach never allows you to settle into a scene, but the episodes are too amusing (even darkly funny) to complain about. When her grandfather tells the left-handed I-jing that the left hand only commits evil, she begins a shoplifting spree and ponders cutting off her own hand to absolve herself.
A less assured filmmaker might have settled and turned in an episodic project. Indeed, Girl frustrates when it sometimes teases narrative paths it doesn’t take. But Tsou (who co-wrote the film with Sean Baker of Anora fame) intertwines these intergenerational perspectives into something more plot-driven and satisfying. I-jing’s stealing and I-ann’s toxic worklife build momentum for a cathartic third act.
There is no performance anything less than great in Left-handed Girl, but Ma in particular takes a star turn as the impulsive and hard-up (but sensitive) I-ann. Meanwhile, Brandon Huang steals scenes as Johnny, a character who emotionally supports the three female leads and forms the film’s compassionate heart.
These characters feel familiar within Tsou and Baker’s previous work—I-ann is not unlike a Taiwanese Anora, while Johnny recalls Willem Dafoe’s character in The Florida Project. Of course, there is some indebtedness to Yi Yi, another family drama with episodic, multi-generational storytelling. And yet Left-handed Girl never feels like a retread or rip-off. The film’s tight pacing, bright palette, and bold engagement with the darker corners of Taipei society make it a distinctive entry in both Tsou’s body of work and Taiwanese cinema writ large.
Beyond exploring girlhood, what really ties Girl and Left-handed Girl together is the subject of intergenerational trauma, and how that trauma runs like a malignant thread through the casts of each film. In Girl, domestic violence is a cyclical motif passed from father to mother to daughter. For Left-handed Girl, it comes in the more subtle—but still damaging—preference for males in conservative families. Shu-fen, the single mother character, is neglected by her parents in favour of her younger brother in ways that leave her and her own family in a precarious state. She is treated like damaged goods, with her own mother telling her, “Women married off once are water poured away.” But, like a cursed inheritance, Shu-fen takes the same attitude towards her own daughter.
Left-handed Girl is the better film here, almost to the point it feels unfair to compare the two. Either way, each work gives voice to otherwise neglected female characters and illuminates taboo topics. For Taiwanese cinema, that is a welcome new wave.