Left-Handed Girl: a Taiwanese comedy with a wild, whirling sense of momentum

Be careful what you say; children will listen. That’s the well-trodden and evocative theme of Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo debut feature Left-Handed Girl – a contemporary drama which wears its fairytale elements cosily on its sleeves. The film won a prize at Cannes Critics’ Week and was recently announced as Taiwan’s official selection for the Oscars, where it stands a good chance of making the final shortlist. It’s artful entertainment – the kind of smooth, accessible movie that travels well on the festival circuit without betraying its commitments to its home turf.

The title refers to five-year old I-Jing (Nina Ye), an adorable little girl in thrall to a bizarre notion: that the devil has somehow possessed her southpaw and is using her to do his bidding. The culprit behind this premature existential crisis is I-Jing’s grandfather, a stoic old-timer who doesn’t realise the consequences of his own poker-faced teasing (male obliviousness and its consequences are a running theme in a movie without much patience for it). Operating under what she believes to be Satan’s power, I-Jing begins committing increasingly brazen acts of theft, leveraging her burgeoning resourcefulness as a shoplifter against pangs of guilt. Things get worse when her left hand accidentally figures in a legitimate – if comic – tragedy, one with a (non-human) body count: say hello to Chekhov’s meerkat. I-Jing is devastated to have blood on her fingers; we see her eyeing a cleaver in the kitchen, as if hoping to sever her evil tendencies directly at the source.

The innocent contemplation of inherent vice – and the resulting implication about the value of keeping our hands to ourselves, left or otherwise – serves as a load-bearing subplot in a carefully constructed and mostly engaging ensemble comedy. Tsou’s protagonists represent three successive generations of Taiwanese women, all living under one roof in a fugue of mutual and frenetic dependency; arriving at their new apartment in Taipei, they’re disappointed to see that it’s smaller than advertised.

Single mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), a woman in her early forties, runs a noodle stand in an arcade, a start-up that’s barely worth the trouble of its operation. Her older, twenty-something daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) is a hell-raiser; because Shu-Fen can’t afford college tuition, I-Ann minds her little sister (she loves I-Jing but is none too chuffed to be a caregiver of convenience).

The night market where Shu-Fen has set up shop makes for a fascinating, labyrinthine backdrop. It’s a haven for eccentric hard-sell artists, and Tsou cultivates an atmosphere of gentle, rubbernecking curiosity – there’s always something to look at, or somebody causing a scene. To help her mother pay the rent, I-Ann takes a job as a ‘betel nut beauty’, slinging (mild) stimulants to seedy men happy to pull up on their bikes for an eyeful. She’s so determined to convey her unhappiness that she hooks up with her married boss, in what plays as a more grown-up (if not exactly mature) version of I-Jing’s compulsive grabbiness, with a very different – and potentially harrowing – set of consequences. And so it goes, a swift, ruefully funny roundelay of compromised, questionable decision-making under the glowing neon sign of late capitalism. For these women, desire and shame are both forms of currency – and, moreover, two sides of the same coin.

Money makes the world go ’round, and Left-Handed Girl has a fluid, whirling sense of momentum, a quality attributable in part to the participation of Sean Baker, who co-wrote the screenplay in addition to being credited as the sole editor (as he is on his own features). Baker and Tsou are long-time collaborators (she produced Anora, 2024, and several of its predecessors) and they’re obviously on the same modern-picaresque wavelength; the Baker movies Left-Handed Girl most recalls are Take Out (2004) and Prince of Broadway (2008), with their driving, street-hassle-style narratives. The film’s roving camerawork (by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao) is compelling in and of itself; the problem is that as the movie goes on, the swift, glancing nature of the storytelling gets caught up in the machinery of the plot. The surging musical score only barely conceals the sound of gears grinding.

Early in the proceedings, we learn that Shu-Fen’s siblings are planning an elaborate 60th party for their mother, an imperious, tight-fisted matriarch unwilling to loosen her purse strings for her eldest and most embattled daughter. We can safely assume, then, that all the characters’ individual troubles and traumas will be given a nice, convenient spot to converge near the end of the film – which they do, in a scene whose wild, clashing emotions slightly exceed Tsou’s ability to contain them. The same obviousness hangs over a subplot about an elaborate family scam to manufacture and distribute fake -passports, which are just waiting around for idle (left) hands to snatch. It’s a fine line between sturdy engineering and predictability and Left-Handed Girl doesn’t always find the right side of it; the script’s biggest twist falls flat because of how obviously Tsou is hiding it in plain sight.

That Left-Handed Girl works in spite of its schematism is a testament to Tsou’s skill at working with her actors, all of whom are excellent. Tsai, a former model and television star, embodies the slumped fortitude of a woman who has grown accustomed to putting her own happiness second; her reluctant flirtations with an affectionate, well-meaning fellow market vendor (Brando Huang) evince a credible, lived-in cringe. Ma, who’s making her debut, is a striking camera subject – sufficiently bratty and soulful that you can see the chip on her provocatively exposed shoulders. And Ye, whose smooth, anxious face is the movie’s recurring locus of feeling, is instantly indelible. There’s one crucial extreme close-up where the camera is plastered to the side of I-Jing’s face, as if she was about to get sucked into the lens and come out the other end. It’s been a long time since a child character felt so three-dimensional. 

► Left-Handed Girl is in UK cinemas from 14 November and on Netflix from 28 November.