The first glimpse of Taipei in director Shih-Ching Tsou‘s debut solo outing is a blur of light and skyscraper seen through a toy prism, an almost-too-perfect cue for the structure of the movie to come. Characters and situations will fragment and recombine in ever-changing symmetries, the axis of sympathy and resentment flipping and flipping again as several generations of women in the same Taiwanese family tumble through a couple of tumultuous months. “Left-Handed Girl” is an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it’s perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director’s native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle.
After a gradually explained absence of several years, Shu-Fen (Janet Tsai) is moving back to the city with her two daughters: sulky, lissome, college-aged I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and charming, inquisitive little I-Jing (Nina Ye). I-Jing is entranced by her new home, and especially by the flashy, pulsating night market that becomes her playground when her careworn mother sets up a noodle stand in one of its vacant stalls. I-Ann fiddles with her phone and complains that their new apartment “looks a lot smaller than the photo.”
The dramatic wheels are set in motion early, with Shu-Fen, always pressed for money, further strapped by her decision to pay for her estranged ex-husband’s funeral, while attracting the amorous attentions of the good-natured doofus who runs the neighboring knick-knack stand. Expressing little interest or faith in the noodle shop’s future, I-Ann gets a job as a “betel nut beauty” (a specifically Taiwanese phenomenon whereby pretty girls dress sexily to hawk the mild stimulant from garishly lit booths around the city). She becomes sexually entangled with her boss, while I-Jing spends her time scampering through the night market’s tacky grifter’s paradise, and adopts a meerkat as a pet.
Beyond the immediate family, there’s further conflict: Shu-Fen’s vain, judgmental mother is embroiled in a smuggling/trafficking racket, while her husband callously tells little I-Jing that her left-handedness is a curse, as the left hand “belongs to the devil.” In an incisive observation of the way that an adult’s words can sometimes settle on a child with unusual weight, I-Jing absorbs this folk superstition without question, and begins to shoplift gaudy trinkets from surrounding market stalls, only ever using her evil left hand.
There is drama going on across multiple planes, and it takes quite some skillful direction to keep each strand as propulsive and engaging as the next, but Tsou toggles between the different perspectives with a jugglers’s grace, showing deep compassion for her characters (except perhaps the rather harshly drawn grandmother) even when they have none for each other. It is only a slightly contrived late scene that skews a little soapy, when a drunken showdown, a pregnancy scare and the simmering sexism of Taiwanese society all abruptly boil over into resentful revelation during one big fiesta of socially embarrassing bust-ups.
But even when the storytelling falters, the film’s pulse beats steady in its ravishing iPhone cinematography, credited to Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao. The widescreen lens gapes wider and wider, as though trying to devour nighttime vistas of the neon-lit city in ever bigger gulps. It is a story all to itself, this buzzing metropolis of seediness and hope, and at times, simply zooming on a scooter through Taipei streets lit loudly against a darkened sky, feels like the most wantonly cinematic activity imaginable. Tsou, who is Sean Baker‘s frequent collaborator (he takes on co-writing producing and editing duties here), produced his pioneering iPhone-shot “Tangerine,” and the ravishing visuals of “Left-Handed Girl” demonstrate just how far that technology has evolved.
Tsou also previously co-directed “Take Out” with Baker, which followed an undocumented Chinese immigrant racing against the clock to pay off a debt. But although that suggests a certain kinship with the struggling women of “Left-Handed Girl,” the Baker/Tsou joint with which this movie feels most spiritually compatible is “The Florida Project,” particularly given the recognizable rhythms of Baker’s editing during some of the sequences shot from I-Jing’s eye level.
In one jump-cut scene, the little girl scurries back to the noodle stop through the market while percussive music plays, bursting with fear and excitement at her new illicit hobby. It is a masterclass in sensory immersion, the staccato cutting mimicking the adrenaline rush of the novice shoplifter that is coursing through her kiddie veins, and along with those scooter scenes and the ravenous shots of Taipei streetlife, it is everything that is special about this endearing movie. Every now and then, for just a fleeting, poignant moment, the fragmentary, kaleidoscopic image resolves into one simple expression of recaptured love for the first place you ever called home.
