Alive and brimming the place most neorealist competition films favor the indifferent sluggish crawl that strains towards a imaginative and prescient of actual life, Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo directing debut “Left-Handed Woman” is born from a collaboration with a longtime buddy, and a filmmaker acquainted to most individuals studying this.
Sean Baker co-writes (with Tsou), produces, and edits the Taiwanese filmmaker’s Cannes Critics’ Week premiere after Tsou, for many years, produced Baker outings like “Tangerine,” “Purple Rocket,” and “The Florida Undertaking.” A kaleidoscopic, if ultimately melodramatic, portrait of a Taiwanese household returning to Taipei to arrange an evening market noodle store, “Left-Handed Woman” isn’t Tsou’s first at-bat as director: She co-helmed Baker’s 2004 indie name-maker “Take Out,” a couple of Chinese language meals supply employee hustling in New York Metropolis.
Tsou applies the stressed vitality of her longtime collaborator’s beloved social-realist works — portraits of women and men working towards their class station to discover a higher dwelling — to “Left-Handed Woman,” which rests on the skillfully directed efficiency of a five-year-old woman (Nina Ye, a small little one who effervescently instructions the digital camera) within the lead. The film, even when monitoring the older daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and mom Shu-Fen (Janel Tasi) who make up this heartwarming household trio, is at all times contained in the tiny ladies’ eyes and ears, trying on the world from a spot of wonderment and confusion as she tries to make sense of an grownup world. The woman’s grasp, although, on Mandarin and years spent dwelling with adults and fewer kids makes her already nearly too mature for her personal good.
“Left-Handed Woman” threatens to crash-land with a melodramatic pile-up of unearthed household secrets and techniques at a birthday banquet for the woman’s grandmother, each technology partaking in histrionics that carry to life previous resentments most well-liked to be left by all exterior of Taipei and previously. Till then, this full of life characteristic, lensed by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao with a high-contrast, bright-lights urgency that submerges you in Taipei metropolis life day and evening, hits on a extra understated, common nerve of sophistication battle and the traditional traditions (together with, in fact, the customary misogyny) turning into much less modern in our trendy, addled instances.
Lens flares and twinkling glares, rooms and areas flooded with gentle and colour, make “Left-Handed Woman” a visually dazzling expertise, as we’re swept off by way of moped into the streaking sights and sounds of Taipei. I-Jing (Nina Ye) arrives together with her mom and older sister from rural Taiwan, again within the hometown she by no means knew as a fair smaller little one, potential financial alternative awaiting the fractured household within the capital metropolis. They reconnect with Shu-Fen’s mom, the grandma of I-ann and I-Jing, who hasn’t seen any of them for years. In Taiwanese-traditional matriarchal vogue, the grandmother begins fretting over twenty-something I-Ann’s (the filmmakers discovered Ma on Instagram) looser means of costume.
I-Jing and I-Ann’s mom Shu-Fen (Tsai) is in Taipei to open up a noodle store on rented dime — and is sort of instantly behind on the funds. I-Ann, who as soon as dreamed of college life however is now shackled to being a surrogate mom to her youthful sister, is willful and rebellious. She takes up work at a betel nut stand in the identical evening market — betel nut being a stimulant, classifiable drug in Taiwan — that stand itself fronting as a tobacco store, partaking in listless sexual encounters with its frontman. There are, inevitably and maybe predictably, dire penalties right here, as signaled when I-Ann has to run to the road to puke throughout her shift.
Surprising being pregnant is a basic melodramatic trope in any film, one which by no means appears to really feel much less shoved in, although simply maintain on, as a result of the “Left-Handed Woman” script makes I-Ann’s curveball an integral a part of its story. In the meantime, I-Jing is left to her personal gadgets, roaming the evening market and town, particularly whereas her mom is busy elevating (and barely) the medical and funeral prices for I-Jing’s father, immediately in hospital and unable to talk or transfer. Once more, it’s lots of melodrama thrust in without delay, as if this film couldn’t simply let their characters transfer naturally by way of the story world, as an alternative throwing plot hijinks at them to make their return to Taipei all of the extra fraught with catastrophe. As if exhibiting face in a metropolis you used to dwell in, and having to start out up a enterprise there on day one, weren’t exhausting sufficient.
“Left-Handed Woman” routinely returns to the cultural thought of saving and/or dropping face, how a lot of the Taiwanese tradition right here is about placing on a entrance the place our deepest traumas and disasters are buried beneath the ground ever beneath us. However there’s little room for the previous to cover, because the condo I-Jing and her sister and mom transfer into, as I-Ann observes, is “smaller than the photograph.” Nobody has any private area, so how would the ghosts of the previous have wherever else to cover, both?
Additionally making I-Jing’s integration into Taipei life a problem is her left-handedness, amid a cultural bias that prefers the proper hand as a lot as different arbitrary decorum. Her surly grandfather warns that the left hand is “the satan’s hand,” which leads I-Jing to suspect she is perhaps possessed by evil itself when that very left hand results in a most unlucky slapstick incident involving her lovable pet meerkat, maybe her solely buddy on this lonely world. That very left hand additionally takes up informal petty shoplifting, and in case you had been ever a small little one who casually purloined a trinket or two from a present store, you’ll perceive the frustrations Tsou and Baker mine from her bemused sudden lifetime of petty crime.
If solely “Left-Handed Woman” trusted its small-scale, intrinsic human dramas sufficient to keep away from the movie’s wildly over-the-top conclusion at a birthday banquet celebrating I-Jing’s grandmother. Screeching and yelling, jilted lovers, and generational disappointment flood right into a finale as theatrical as a Broadway stage play regardless of affecting performances, wrapping up too rashly to think about how all of what simply went down is about to deeply traumatize the younger I-Jing for all times.
As a lot as “Left-Handed Woman” is in regards to the previous flashflooding into the current, even whereas these the previous retains its hook in attempt to make a brand new life, the movie is much less in regards to the future and what’s subsequent for I-Jing and her household. Tsou and Baker open a contemporary window that’s quick, as cluttered as it’s by superimposed panes of the earlier than, onto the now of this core group. However the movie does go away them on higher floor to face on than they began, as probably the most hope-filled of basic melodramas do.
What’s culturally touched on right here will likely be recognizable to Taiwanese audiences, how the ahead movement of day by day lives is tamped down by expectations which might be historic in scope. No matter a number of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Woman” nonetheless pronounces Tsou as a assured directorial expertise with a uncommon exuberance: It feels extra like a 3rd or fourth movie, however that’s additionally as a result of it mainly is, Tsou having not simply shadowed Baker through the years, however having been straight immersed and embedded within the course of on his directorial movies. The imprimatur of Baker, a lifelong supporter of rising storytellers and folks on the margins, will draw audiences to this touching movie, however they’ll stroll away with the lasting impression of Tsou’s personal singular perspective — one infused with colour and furiously energetic element — as an alternative.
Grade: B
“Left-Handed Woman” premiered within the 2025 Cannes Critics’ Week. It’s presently looking for U.S. distribution. Le Pacte is dealing with gross sales.