‘Left-Handed Girl’ review: Sean Baker-backed family drama is set on the bustling streets of Taipei

Dir: Shih-ching Tsou. Taiwan/France/USA/UK. 2025. 109mins

Returning to her native Taiwan from her US residence, common Sean Baker collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou channels the color and chaos of Taipei’s well-known evening markets right into a tri-generational feminine story with a stressed, messy attraction. It’s right here that burdened mum Shu-fen (Janel Tsai) tries to make a go of a noodle stall, leaving her super-cute five-year-old lady I-Jing (Nina Ye), within the not very dependable care of her oldest daughter, I-Ann (Shih-yuan Ma).

Tsou brings some distinctly Taiwanese themes to the fore

Avenue-shot, cluttered and claustrophobic, Left-Handed Lady is each quick and sluggish, shifting alongside at a relentless tempo but taking time to advance a storyline that seems to be in regards to the precariousness of ladies’s independence and the perpetuation of male privilege – typically by the very ladies that undergo below it. Regardless of its whatever-works handheld aesthetic, it is a movie that can journey extensively – not simply due to the Baker stamp of approval. There’s engagement in its vitality, its sense of humour, its simmering feminist anger and the standout performances of three advantageous leads.

You would learn the story – co-written with Baker, who additionally produces and edits – as a type of mash-up of Take Out and The Florida Mission. Tsou and Baker co-directed the primary, a 2004 micro-budget movie about an undocumented immigrant who works as a restaurant deliveryman in New York, whereas The Florida Mission was certainly one of 4 Baker-directed movies that Tsou produced between 2012 and 2021. However Tsou additionally brings some distinctly Taiwanese themes to the fore. Amongst them are the favouring of sons over daughters in a society that’s nonetheless in some ways deeply Confucian, and the development of younger folks altering their names to vary their luck.

Shu-fen and her two daughters have simply moved right into a cramped new residence within the large metropolis. Mum rents a meals stall in an area evening market, hoping she will be able to make the funds, whereas I-Ann – a sensible scholar who couldn’t afford to go to school – works as a ‘betel nut magnificence’, dressing in skimpy clothes to draw male purchasers to a roadside retailer the place she is engaged in a desultory affair with the loutish boss. I-Jing is beginning at a brand new main college, however she additionally turns into an after-school fixture on the market the place kindly stall homeowners like Johnny (Brando Huang) regulate her whereas she wanders.

Johnny’s shy crush on Shu-fen and delicate makes an attempt to assist her out of her debt spiral makes him the movie’s solely optimistic male function mannequin. Shu-fen feels obliged to pay for the funeral of the husband who abused her years earlier than, whereas her personal mom, who has gotten herself concerned in a pretend US passport rip-off, has secretly left her Taipei residence to her already well-off eldest son, reducing Shu-fen and her two sisters out of the inheritance. As if that’s not unhealthy sufficient, grandpa, a grizzly outdated traditionalist, tells little I-Jing that she ought to cease utilizing her left-hand to eat or draw with – as a result of it’s the ‘satan’s hand’.

That trope offers a troublesome, uncooked movie with its most important comedian engine, as I-Jing decides that something her left hand does will not be her accountability. Left-Handed Lady channels most of its drama by the whiplash-tense determine of I-Ann and most of its comedy by her oh-so-cute little sister, leaving mum because the exhausted wreck within the center caught between her daughters’ wants, her sisters’ carping and her mom’s refusals to assist. When a meerkat immediately seems within the residence, it’s a curveball.

However the true curveball comes on the finish, in a protracted, standalone, real-time scene of startling dramatic energy set on the household matriarch’s birthday celebration. It is a set piece worthy of Mike Leigh or Dardenne brothers, and it’s credit score to Tsou’s path and Baker’s enhancing that, for all of the sense that it’s been stapled on to the top of the story, it nonetheless works.