(3.5 stars)
It’s fitting that, as 82 million Americans travel home for Thanksgiving, a stunner of a Taiwanese movie is dropping on Netflix, offering escape to a world of neon lights and night markets, moped rides and drunken romance.
What better way to avoid your own family than to cozy up with this one — three generations of women so accustomed to hustling for survival that even the cutest little girl in the world feels compelled to engage in some incredibly cute petty theft?
“Left-Handed Girl” is the first solo feature from “Anora” director Sean Baker’s longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou, and Taiwan’s submission to the 98th Academy Awards. And even the opening credits raise a hint of mystery. Names play out across the bright colors of a kaleidoscope being wielded by 5-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye), our adorable, unreliable narrator. “It feels like a magical place,” she says, as her family’s minivan speeds toward their new home in Taipei.
The looks on the faces of her mother and college-age sister suggest a more complicated reality, but the joy of this film is seeing so much of it through I-Jing’s unjaded eyes. Taipei really does seem magical when experienced by someone 3 feet tall.
Our trio seems to be starting over from rock bottom. Their minimalist new apartment is smaller than the one they were forced to leave, we learn, because the girls’ father abandoned them. Their perpetually cashed-strapped mother, Shu-Fen (veteran actress Janel Tsai) is trying her hand at opening a noodle stand in the night market. Rebellious I-Ann (sensational acting discovery Shih-Yuan Ma), decides there’s better money to be had at one of Taipei’s ubiquitous betel nut stands, as one of the scantily clad “beauties” selling the addictive stimulant to taxi drivers from neon-lit roadside stands. She also sometimes lets her deadbeat boss have sex with her, with all the enthusiasm of checking her email.
Meanwhile, a blissfully unaffected I-Jing gets to use the night market as her personal playground, running around with an abandon that would send most American parents into cardiac arrest, as a community of shopkeepers watches over her. Her greatest hardship is being babysat by her grandfather: “He smells like stinky tofu!”
The turning point for our tiny heroine comes when her superstitious grandfather chastises her for using her left hand, telling her it’s “the devil’s hand.” Shame keeps I-Jing up at night, until she decides to put her evil appendage to use, going on shoplifting sprees around the market, and amassing a pile of trinkets and toys her family would never be able to afford. She’s not doing anything wrong; her devil-hand is! The sequences are exhilarating, shot at her eye level, with just the right freneticism to feel I-Jing’s adrenaline from her newfound illicit hobby pulsating through the screen. But there’s a pernicious sadness to the shenanigans, in how early this little girl is taught to think her differences make her flawed.
This movie has been 25 years in the making. Tsou was essentially I-Jing — her grandfather shamed her for using her left hand, and like many girls in Taiwan, she was reeducated to use her right hand. While they were students at the New School in New York, Tsou told Baker the story, and the two of them traveled to Taipei in 2001, eager to map out a movie but unable to figure out the financing. Instead, they co-directed 2004’s “Take Out.” Tsou’s since produced Baker’s features “Starlet,” “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.” Baker returned the favor as a producer on “Left-Handed Girl,” which he co-wrote with Tsou and also edited.
Centering a film on a child is often a recipe for disaster, or at least cheesiness. But Tsou and Baker already had practice depicting a heartbreaking loss of innocence in “The Florida Project.” This film is sweeter, and far less harrowing, but it has the same nonjudgmental gaze and the vérité camera stylings, even though Baker was shooting “Anora” during production and never set foot on set. The film’s dazzling visuals are all Tsou — she set up a working noodle stand in the real Tonghua Night Market and ran around with a skeleton team of five so as not to attract attention, creating incredible lived-in cinematography, captured all on location and using only iPhones.
Every frame bursts with life. But what really elevates the story are the darker themes peeking in. Every woman on-screen is scrambling to scrape together a living, including Shu-Fen’s mother, who’s running a light passport-fraud ring out of her living room, in a society that still favors men — no matter how undeserving they may be or how badly they fail. (The one bright spot is Johnny, the fanny-pack-wearing doofus, played with endearing sweetness by Teng-Hui Huang, who runs a stand next to Shu-Fen’s selling magic erasers and phone chargers, and who’s clearly in love with her.)
Most intriguing is Ma’s portrayal of I-Ann. Recently awarded best new performer at the Golden Horse Awards (the Mandarin-language equivalent of the Academy Awards), she’s a model who Tsou found on Instagram and is a riveting natural. Her character is the embodiment of how these women have the cards stacked against them — too old to be innocent, too young to carry this much weight. A shocking revelation rearranges the viewer’s brain about her anger toward the men in her life.
In the end, the movie’s title feels less like a descriptor than a battle cry. In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.
R. Streaming on Netflix. For sexual content, language and too much luscious food porn. In Mandarin with English subtitles. 109 minutes.
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