Furious energy down alleys and boulevards. A little girl trying to bond with her distracted mother. A familial gaggle of working-class women. Tactful editing showing off the emotional range of female characters. Humor across nuanced class divides. A massive confrontation where a woman doesn’t go down without a fight.
You wouldn’t be too wrong if you guessed the topic du jour was Sean Baker’s (“Anora”) oeuvre and moviemaking style. That’s because you’d also be discussing the work of Shih-Ching Tsou, Baker’s longtime collaborator, friend from film school, producer of his celebrated films “Starlet,” “The Florida Project,” and “Tangerine,” and co-writer and co-director of “Take Out,” Baker’s lesser-known 2004 film about a Chinese food delivery worker in New York. Particularly, you’d be ruminating on the images, characters, and craft of “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou’s Taiwan-set first feature as a solo director, debuting this week in the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes, branded with some of Baker’s hallmarks since he co-wrote and co-produced it with Tsou, and also edited it.
Talking to IndieWire over Zoom a few days before flying to Cannes, Tsou frankly spoke of her childhood as inspiration for this fleet-footed, darkly funny intergenerational drama about a mother and her two daughters returning to Taipei to open a stall at one of the city’s iconic night markets, even as Tsou’s own mom was present off-camera in the room during the conversation. Regarding her relationship with Baker, Tsou credited her two-decade experience working with him in preparing to direct a movie set in her hometown: “I have learned so much working with Sean, because everything in his films is hands-on. I was doing a lot of things on set, from learning the research process to talking to people from the community. We tried to tell the story as real as possible.”
About the return to directing after a long gap of 20 years, she said, “For ‘Left-Handed Girl,’ I had the idea since I was very young. The first time I brought it to Sean, he thought it was really interesting. So we started to write the draft together. After every other film that we finished, we would always come back to this film. Unfortunately, the time [to make it] wasn’t right. It took a while to get the funding together, to get people interested. I think it’s all about timing. This is the time for ‘Left-Handed Girl.’ This is the time for me to come back to the director’s seat.”
One of the central conflicts begins when the cute five-year-old daughter, I-Jing (Nina Ye), is reprimanded by her otherwise aloof grandfather for being left-handed. He warns her that the left hand is the devil’s hand and wonders why her mother hasn’t forced her to become dexterous with the right. The fear this instills in I-Jing — already ignored by her busy mother, nor attended to by her mercurial older sister, I-Ann, who holds a grudge against her mother and rebels by working at a shady betel nut stand — sets off a secrets-unearthing chain of events. The cultural bias favoring right-handedness, however, stands out as a fascinating myth and theme.
Unsurprisingly, Tsou is left-handed. “My mother remembers that she ‘corrected’ me when I was very young. That was just the time when everybody was expected to use their right hand. You don’t want to hit people sitting at the wrong table. Or you don’t want to get your hands dirty when you are using calligraphy pens,” she said. Is this superstition a Taiwanese or Chinese cultural belief? An idiosyncrasy of the 80s? Tsou says, “It’s interesting. I actually asked many people. This left-handed thing is actually across cultures: in Japan, in India, in Jewish culture, in German culture, they all think the left hand is the devil’s hand. My grandfather also told me about it. It’s to scare kids into not using it, but there is some religious basis to it too. It’s not necessarily the devil of Christianity. Just something evil.”
So when I-Jing starts thinking that she just might be the devil, she begins her klepto phase, stealing trinkets from the night market where she freely roams. In this, the film’s arresting central stretch, Tsou’s visual language — alive, kaleidoscopic colors and low-placed cameras — really pops, showcasing how all three women, but specifically the two sisters, have gone awry.
Speaking to these craft aspects, Tsou says, “We definitely want the audience to [physically] get to I-Jing’s [ground] level [in the night market]. Kids probably see more color than adults, who are more used to it.” By contrast, the betel nut stand where I-Ann works is more neon, greener, and darker. “When you get to the noodle stand, the color is different again. The color difference shows the different inner worlds and interpretations of the three women.”
For Tsou, the night market is as vital a character. “‘Yi Yi’ is one of the Taiwanese films I really love. Having grown up in Taipei, I recognized so many places in the film. I wanted to portray Taiwan in the same way, show places that bring back the memory, but with different places [than ‘Yi Yi’]. The night market is chaotic, very communal. It’s not just a backdrop or a setting. It actually jumps forward. Especially after living in New York for so long, when I go back to Taiwan, I actually rediscover it. I see all the things that [locals] take for granted. That was the inspiration for me to go back to Taipei. I want to show it to the whole world.”
Another of Tsou’s favorites is Mike Leigh’s “Secrets and Lies,” where, at the end, a group of people get together at a party, and skeletons scramble out. Similarly, the setting for the high drama at the end of “Left-Handed Girl” is a fancy restaurant where the extended family and friends assemble to celebrate a birthday.
Staying in that one location takes a bit of getting used to, given the fluid camerawork and the nifty, high-energy editing of the film’s middle. Tsou agrees, and attributes this dual-pacing strategy to Baker’s vision for the edit, and also to the back-and-forth written into the script, a process that began in 2012 when she and Sean arrived in Taiwan, scouted the night market which ended up in the final film, and also auditioned a five-year-old girl with whom they shot the first trailer. The story fell into place once Baker saw Taiwan firsthand.
“Cutting back and forth in the daily lives of the characters, we compare them, see how they move through the day, how they process their environments, and how their busy outer world affects their inner world. The little girl doesn’t really understand anything, but you can tell she’s trying to understand the meaning of adults’ conversations.”
Thus the film’s intentional camera placement, the characters’ inner journeys, and the night market’s energy captured by the fluid camera, all become assets for Baker to work with. During the actual shoot — which spanned five five-day weeks — Baker could not be present since at the time due to challenges in gaining a visa to Taiwan. But he was still a significant presence. “When we were doing camera tests,” said Tsou, “I had conference calls with Sean. We sat down together with the DPs to tell them how we should shoot the film. We wanted the night market to be fluid. In the restaurant, we wanted to see everybody’s facial reactions. We collaborated to get what Sean wanted in the end.”
The actors were equally crucial to the success of the film. “I learned casting through working on Sean’s films, [beginning with] ‘Starlet,’ where I found the old lady in the locker room in LA. [For ‘Left-Handed Girl,’] I found I-Ann on Instagram. I didn’t want to do a lot of street casting, since I don’t live in Taiwan, so I tried other ways, like going online or asking friends. I also went the traditional casting director route, but I didn’t find anybody who’s authentic. The little girl was recommended by a casting director, and she already did a lot of commercials in Taiwan, so she has a really nice presence.”
Given the tumults and local challenges presented by casting, Tsou was the most surprised by Shih-Yuan Ma, the Instagram find who plays the older teenage daughter I-Ann. “She has never acted before. So I was really surprised when she gave us such a wonderful performance. Especially during the scene when she was crying on the toilet, she cried the first time on cue. After we shot everything, she said, wait, can I do it again? I want to do it a different way. And she did. I was like, wow. She’s such a natural grown actor.”
Pondering on the similarity in themes of her two films 20 years apart (“Take Out” and “Left-Handed Girl”), Tsou said, “My mom has six sisters. Each is married to a different kind of family, some with more money than others, so when we get together, we have a weird dynamic. Sometimes, you [as an individual] end up doing everything on your own. You hope your family will help you, but in the end, everybody has their own problem. So I think it’s kind of interesting to see how we’re weird and also have a very real family dynamic on screen.”
That dynamic, Tsou hopes, is one Taiwanese audiences will identify with. The film has already been invited to the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei. “That’s a huge launch pad for our film,” she said. On the Croisette, though, which she is so excited to visit for the premiere, she will benefit from Cannes attendees’ curiosity about Baker’s next project, a year after “Anora” won the Palme d’Or, before going on to win multiple Oscars. Surely, the devil’s hand is entirely the stuff of myth, and won’t influence this movie’s Cannes journey.
“Left-Handed Girl” premieres in Cannes Critics’ Week on Thursday, April 15.
