In a project that took a decade to secure funding, TANGERINE collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou teams up with frequent collaborator Sean Baker to direct another film shot on an iPhone, bringing working-class domesticity to the big screen. LEFT-HANDED GIRL is charming, chaotic, and brimming with life, telling an urban Taiwanese domestic through its titular child’s perspective.
From its kaleidoscopic opening credits, LEFT-HANDED GIRL promises vibrancy and disorientation, as young five-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye) adapts to the big city. When her mother opens a noodle stall at a night market in Taipei, I-Jing wanders alone through brightly lit, colourful stalls, at the heels of customers, making this unique nocturnal retail landscape her own.
Mother Shu-fen (Janel Tsai) spends her waking hours at the stall, and wastes her rent money on the health costs for her dying ex-husband. Meanwhile, big sister I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) gets a job at a betelnut stall. A high school dropout, her independence is marred by a boss who hits on her and encourages her to flirt with customers, leaving her to believe her body is her only valid commodity.
Wide-eyed and impressionable, with a mother and sister caught up with their own tears and troubles, I-Jing is reintroduced to her grandparents, who aren’t much better as her guardians. Her grandmother seems to be involved in an immigration scam, and her grandfather gives her a complex about using her ‘devil hand’, a phrase that she takes all too literally.
“The soap-opera elements of the story – pregnancy drama and inheritance confusion – bring to light the looming presence of patriarchy, which encroaches insidiously on this female bubble.”
While her grandfather’s influence is relatively minor, the derailment of I-Jing’s life is cleverly mirrored in her elders, who deal with the influence of old-fashioned men in their lives on a more devastating scale. The soap-opera elements of the story – pregnancy drama and inheritance confusion – bring to light the looming presence of patriarchy, which encroaches insidiously on this female bubble. This shadow is also seen in a couple willing to pay a mistress to bear a son for them, and the grandmother ignoring her three struggling daughters, instead leaving all her money and her house to her uncaring son. The stress brought on by men, even those who are absent and unborn, chips away at the precarious life Shu-fen and I-Ann are trying to build, and each actress, especially Ma in her screen debut, portrays that crumbling confidence with complexity.
Comparisons are inevitable, and if THE FLORIDA PROJECT is the sun, then LEFT-HANDED GIRL is the moon, similar but distinct, with Tsou’s approach to a similar concept moving it across the world and adding her own directorial spin. Nina Ye’s adorable and precocious performance matches up to that of Brooklynn Prince’s, each successfully showing the vulnerability, openness, and hardiness of children. The dynamism and intimacy of the iPhone camera, combined with Baker’s eye for editing, help the viewer flit between comedy and tragedy, led by the unique perspective of youth.
Equal parts comical and concerning, LEFT-HANDED GIRL is about resilience in a man’s world, with a five-year-old’s innocent questions shattering illusions and bringing about change.