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Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Left-Handed Girl' Review: Producer/Co-Writer Sean Baker's First Post-Oscar Film Follows Taiwanese Family's Secrets & Lies
What do you do after a record-setting haul of four individual Oscars including Best Picture for Anora? For Sean Baker, it is returning to his filmmaking roots and the Cannes Film Festival, where he also took the 2024 Palme d'Or for Anora. In this case he isn't directing, instead leaving that to longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou, who worked as a producer with him on earlier films including Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket. The pair also co-directed a film called Take Out 21 years ago, and it has taken that long for Shih-Ching to take the reins of a second film, co-writing the script for Left-Handed Girl with Baker, who also serves as a producer and sole film editor. It premiered today in Cannes as part of Critics' Week. Set in a bustling Taiwanese night market that also seems like a Melrose Place-style food court, the film is focused almost entirely on its female characters: mother Sho-Fen (Janel Tsai), older teen daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), and the youngest child I-Jing (an adorable Nina Ye). Yes there are men here, most notably co-worker Johnny (Brando Hiang), who figure into the action, as well as a grandfather who warns left-handed I-Jing to never use what he terms as 'the devil's hand.' This was the most frightening part for me as I am completely left-handed and had to type this review with my right out of fear. More from Deadline Cannes Film Festival 2025 in Photos: Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, 'Sound Of Falling' & 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' Premieres 'Left-Handed Girl' Clip: Sean Baker Produced & Edited Drama By Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou Debuts In Cannes 'The Little Sister' Review: Nadia Melliti Makes A Striking Debut In Hafsia Herzi's Seductive Coming-Out Story - Cannes Film Festival RELATED: Full List Of Cannes Palme d'Or Winners Through The Years: Photo Gallery All that aside, the real center of it all is this family of three generations of females, their quest to make it in the city of Taipei after living in the countryside and the well-hidden secrets and lies permeating this clan where everyone seems to be hiding something — except maybe young I-Jing, who is most content to traverse the expansive night market or play with her newfound pet meerkat (animal lovers, beware the fate of this particular cast member). Returning to her own home of Taiwan, filmmaker Shih-Ching is content to create a universally recognizable family unit here with Sho-Fen trying to make it on her own while bringing up the ever-independent I-Ann, who is full of wanderlust and an eye for the boys, while spending much of her time saddled with the responsibility of looking after little sister I-Jing. The film darts back and forth between the stories and struggles of this family who live in a society clearly stressing morals and keeping up proper appearances. The pace is leisurely and atmospheric, and we get to know just who they are. Or so we think, until the film takes a real left-handed turn itself at the 60th birthday celebration of the family matriarch. To put it kindly, all hell breaks loose as those closely-kept secrets start exploding into the open. RELATED: Cannes Film Festival 2025 In Photos: Awards Ceremony, Movie Premieres, Parties & More It is at this point that the character-driven tale moves heavily into melodrama territory — a Taiwanese soap opera, as it were — and it is also here that Shih-Ching shows strong command of storytelling and shifting tones with high dramatics that could careen out of control but never do, instead keeping us on the edge of our seats. Baker's tight editing really comes into play here and proves worthy of Douglas Sirk at his height. Ultimately what holds it all together are the strong performances all around. These fine actresses make it entirely watchable. Producers are Shih-Ching, Baker, Mike Goodridge, Jean Labadie and Alice Labadie. Title: Left-Handed GirlFestival: Cannes (Critics' Week)Sales agent: Le PacteDirector: Shih-Ching TsouScreenwriters: Shih-Ching-Tsou and Sean BakerCast: Janel Tsai, Shih-Yuan Ma, Nina Ye, Brando HuangRunning time: 1 hr 49 min RELATED: Oscars: Every Best Picture Winner Back To The Beginning In 1929 Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou's Solo Debut Pulses Like Taipei After Dark
The first glimpse of Taipei in director Shih-Ching Tsou's debut solo outing is a blur of light and skyscraper seen through a toy prism, an almost-too-perfect cue for the structure of the movie to come. Characters and situations will fragment and recombine in ever-changing symmetries, the axis of sympathy and resentment flipping and flipping again as several generations of women in the same Taiwanese family tumble through a couple of tumultuous months. 'Left-Handed Girl' is an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it's perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director's native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle. After a gradually explained absence of several years, Shu-Fen (Janet Tsai) is moving back to the city with her two daughters: sulky, lissome, college-aged I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and charming, inquisitive little I-Jing (Nina Ye). I-Jing is entranced by her new home, and especially by the flashy, pulsating night market that becomes her playground when her careworn mother sets up a noodle stand in one of its vacant stalls. I-Ann fiddles with her phone and complains that their new apartment 'looks a lot smaller than the photo.' More from Variety Young Italian Filmmakers Come to the Fore at Cannes' Un Certain Regard Canadian Cinema Pushes Its Evolution With Arthouse Pics, Auteurs, Indigenous Filmmakers and Animated Offerings at Cannes Texas Incentives Draw More Productions as Lawmakers Mull a Big Increase: 'We Want to Make Sure We're the Ones Telling Our Stories' The dramatic wheels are set in motion early, with Shu-Fen, always pressed for money, further strapped by her decision to pay for her estranged ex-husband's funeral, while attracting the amorous attentions of the good-natured doofus who runs the neighboring knick-knack stand. Expressing little interest or faith in the noodle shop's future, I-Ann gets a job as a 'betel nut beauty' (a specifically Taiwanese phenomenon whereby pretty girls dress sexily to hawk the mild stimulant from garishly lit booths around the city). She becomes sexually entangled with her boss, while I-Jing spends her time scampering through the night market's tacky grifter's paradise, and adopts a meerkat as a pet. Beyond the immediate family, there's further conflict: Shu-Fen's vain, judgmental mother is embroiled in a smuggling/trafficking racket, while her husband callously tells little I-Jing that her left-handedness is a curse, as the left hand 'belongs to the devil.' In an incisive observation of the way that an adult's words can sometimes settle on a child with unusual weight, I-Jing absorbs this folk superstition without question, and begins to shoplift gaudy trinkets from surrounding market stalls, only ever using her evil left hand. There is drama going on across multiple planes, and it takes quite some skillful direction to keep each strand as propulsive and engaging as the next, but Tsou toggles between the different perspectives with a jugglers's grace, showing deep compassion for her characters (except perhaps the rather harshly drawn grandmother) even when they have none for each other. It is only a slightly contrived late scene that skews a little soapy, when a drunken showdown, a pregnancy scare and the simmering sexism of Taiwanese society all abruptly boil over into resentful revelation during one big fiesta of socially embarrassing bust-ups. But even when the storytelling falters, the film's pulse beats steady in its ravishing iPhone cinematography, credited to Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao. The widescreen lens gapes wider and wider, as though trying to devour nighttime vistas of the neon-lit city in ever bigger gulps. It is a story all to itself, this buzzing metropolis of seediness and hope, and at times, simply zooming on a scooter through Taipei streets lit loudly against a darkened sky, feels like the most wantonly cinematic activity imaginable. Tsou, who is Sean Baker's frequent collaborator (he takes on co-writing producing and editing duties here), produced his pioneering iPhone-shot 'Tangerine,' and the ravishing visuals of 'Left-Handed Girl' demonstrate just how far that technology has evolved. Tsou also previously co-directed 'Take Out' with Baker, which followed an undocumented Chinese immigrant racing against the clock to pay off a debt. But although that suggests a certain kinship with the struggling women of 'Left-Handed Girl,' the Baker/Tsou joint with which this movie feels most spiritually compatible is 'The Florida Project,' particularly given the recognizable rhythms of Baker's editing during some of the sequences shot from I-Jing's eye level. In one jump-cut scene, the little girl scurries back to the noodle stop through the market while percussive music plays, bursting with fear and excitement at her new illicit hobby. It is a masterclass in sensory immersion, the staccato cutting mimicking the adrenaline rush of the novice shoplifter that is coursing through her kiddie veins, and along with those scooter scenes and the ravenous shots of Taipei streetlife, it is everything that is special about this endearing movie. Every now and then, for just a fleeting, poignant moment, the fragmentary, kaleidoscopic image resolves into one simple expression of recaptured love for the first place you ever called home. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
