Left-Handed Girl review – striking Taiwanese family drama is a real marvel

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There are few things in a culture as ridiculous and potent as its superstitions. Left-Handed Girl’s I-Jing, a sweet five-year-old who has just moved back to Taipei with her mom and older sister, gets literal firsthand experience when her grandpa admonishes her for using her left hand for everything – it’s not natural; it’s the devil at work, he says.

When I-Jing stares at her appendage with dismay, so begins a new relationship between her and her devil hand as she navigates city life. Shot entirely with iPhones, debut solo director and co-writer Shih-Ching Tsou (the other co-writer is Tsou’s frequent collaborator, Anora’s Sean Baker) summons the frenetic energy and sensory experience of Taipei. There are bright red Chinese characters overtaking the glass windows of a pawn shop; the pleasant melody of trash-collecting trucks; the easy ping-pong of Mandarin and Taiwanese between generations; lush trees against grimy buildings that can nearly make you smell the specific essence of a bustling, wetter city. It’s not so much a love letter from a fan as it is a devotional to a place known by heart. Tsou pairs the kaleidoscopic fragments of the city with the splinters of imperfect people – poignantly and tenderly showing what it means to be a family in Taiwan, and delivering a triumph of a film.

The drama, Taiwan’s submission for best international feature film at the Oscars, starts with I-Jing, her older sister and her mom in a rebuild stage. Pensive mom Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) has set up a night market noodles stand, and the volatile I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) left high school and works at a betel nut stall, where she’s sleeping with her boss. I-Jing, played by a very charming Nina Ye, starts a new school and, with the wonder only a child can have, tests out the potential of this newly anointed devil hand.

As she starts pocketing trinkets at the night market with the cursed limb, separating a good hand that does what’s expected of it and the other that entertains what the heart desires, Tsou gracefully reflects each character’s own dualities. Here, the film delineates the complexities between what a person feels duty-bound to and what she truly wants: Shu-Fen can’t untangle herself from her trash ex-husband’s debts; I-Ann feels relegated to the role her mom wants her to play as she watches her peers move forward; I-Jing is told to be seen and not heard.

Tsou, along with Baker as editor and Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao as cinematographers, skillfully lands us onto each family member’s separate planets, many shots capturing the frisky and delightful rhythms of daily Taipei life. We’re eye-level with I-Jing as she makes her first pilfering, the adrenaline rushing through with a camera shaky and beat staccato. The camera pans overhead as I-Ann rides her scooter at night, city lights glistening in the heat, bringing an expansive feeling of freedom with a pain that’s hers alone to feel.

A sense of duty is deftly woven into each conundrum, as well as the loneliness that comes with it – it’s at once intimate and heartbreaking to see how duty is often a solitary experience. We see it when I-Jing tries in earnest to draw with her right hand, when I-Ann lays in bed after being scorned at an ex-classmate’s motel party. Meanwhile, Shu-Fen scrambles to make rent, her own mom annoyed she needs help yet again. “A married daughter’s like water that’s poured out,” says the grandma (played by a pitch-perfect Xin-Yan Chao); a son would have still been her responsibility.

There are also moments of levity and playfulness, especially with the grandma’s flashes of indignation, time with a meerkat that becomes I-Jing’s pet, and I-Jing’s general delight with the world (relayed with an exuberance that feels akin to previous Tsou and Baker film The Florida Project). Ye (who is left-handed in real life) perfectly walks the tightrope of an innocent child absorbing the financial realities and unknown entities – Shu-Fen’s ex, the grandma’s hijinks, I-Ann and Shu-Fen’s bickering – that surround her. Ma’s I-Ann, too, is a considered portrait of an acerbic teenager dealing with grief, making it feel like an undeniable but unaffordable emotion in an environment where everyone’s just trying to survive.

By the soap opera-like penultimate dinner scene, the clan has nurtured big secrets that lead to the ultimate Taiwanese diu lian (losing of face): getting humiliated in front of an audience (specifically your extended family, the most horrifying way to go down). And the revelations are good – by that point, it’s like discovering a juicy, painful secret about a dear friend. Tsou and Baker’s script sharply examines what it really means to lose face: which shames are noble, which are indulgent, and what should be passed from one generation to the next?

Some of these bombs are left unexcavated after the big showdown, and Left-Handed Girl may leave you dissatisfied – but perhaps also realizing that blowing it all up doesn’t mean closure or a tidy adage immediately follows, or that there will be a devil’s hand to blame. Instead, perhaps the city just wakes up to another day, and, a little lighter (having lost a little face), so do you.