‘Left-Handed Girl’ is Shih-Ching Tsou’s long-awaited arrival

Although Tsou has long worked in the United States (and her latest is a global co-production), the film is Taiwanese to its core, beginning with a family of three—single mother Shu-Fen (Tsai), rebellious teenager I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and bubbly grade schooler I-Jing (Nina Ye)—relocating to the big city to make ends meet. Shu-Fen sets up a noodle stall at a bustling night market, where both girls occasionally help her out, and where she receives romantic attention from Johnny (Brando Huang), an enthusiastic salesman who gives I-Jing odd jobs to keep her occupied. However, the disaffected I-Ann insists she can out-earn her mom at her own job working at a legally dubious betel nut stall, hastening a surprising spiral for the character, which Ma wraps around her like fabric.

All the while, the happy-go-lucky I-Jing functions as an interloper and observer between these various subplots, but begins to doubt herself when her strict grandfather (Akio Chen) insists she stop using her left hand—“The Devil’s Hand”—out of deep-seated superstition. Cultural constraints brush up constantly against the characters’ various hustles, in both minor and major ways. The shadow of Shu-Fen’s broken marriage to I-Ann’s estranged father looms large over both women, especially when he ends up sick and hospitalized, leading to several complicated, hush-hush visits. Similarly, I-Ann’s skimpy attire is a frequent topic of conversation, though it’s part of the defiant façade she fashions for herself, for reasons that finally explode to the surface in the film’s surprisingly twisty final act. And, as though Tsou were completing a sentence she began in Take Out, Shu-Fen’s own mother appears to run an immigration scheme out of her apartment—a Taiwan-to-United States pipeline that, though it seems at first like human trafficking, turns out to have altruistic motives and outcomes.

The plot meanders with a purpose, luring the audience into comforts that are slowly dislodged, as logistical developments are backgrounded in favor of changes in tone. The film’s visual palette is key to this unfurling; although shot with the up-close, unstable appearance of a no-budget video indie, its colors are saturated just past the point of comfort, giving the whole thing an uncanny feel. Neon and halogen lights consume nighttime scenes, while the day is defined by an overpowering wash that heightens skin tones and the glisten of sweat. It’s sickly, but at the same time, alluring.

Nina Ye as I-Jing and Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann in "Left-Handed Girl."

Courtesy of Netflix

Even when “nothing” ostensibly happens, Left-Handed Girl features a sense of excitement and anticipation about what comes next, a sleight of hand that fits perfectly with the movie’s thematic subterfuge. In a saga where shame and family secrets quietly define each interaction and relationship, the surface seems constantly impenetrable—until it isn’t, and the characters’ house of cards comes crashing down in melodramatic fashion.

The film’s naturalistic performances and lo-fi sensibilities clash wildly with its effervescent score, as though the soundtrack to a more prestigious studio drama about a precocious child prodigy had been accidentally beamed into this seedy ground-level saga of an ordinary young girl taking in the enormousness of the world. Amidst all the adult tensions, Ye delivers a fantastic performance as a child caught up in cultural whirlwinds she doesn’t fully understand—mostly because their true meaning has been obfuscated from her. While it may not be impossible to suss out the big reveals, that the mother-daughter drama between Shu-Fen and I-Ann rests on building passive aggression makes the film’s eventual developments no less intriguing, thanks to a pair of performances that skillfully layer palpable moods beneath humdrum interactions.

Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in "Left-Handed Girl."

Courtesy of Netflix

The winding path the movie takes to its conclusions might lose a few viewers along the way, but in its mere one hour and 49 minutes, Left-Handed Girl proves Tsou a deft dramatic storyteller. Her flowers have been long overdue, but with her first solo effort out in the world, it finally seems time for her to the join the ranks of 21st Century indie mavericks walking complex lines between cultures, with a film that takes the sensibilities of modern American independent cinema and transposes them on places and archetypes born from her past life, so to speak. It’s fitting, then, that the movie finds its emotional core in the burial and gradual unearthing of the past, acting as a vessel for Tsou’s very presence and identity as an immigrant filmmaker dealing with characters adjusting to brand-new contexts, and finding themselves in the process.