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Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
With ‘Left-Handed Girl,' Sean Baker's Longtime Producer Shih-Ching Tsou Is Ready ‘to Come Back to the Director's Seat'
Furious energy down alleys and boulevards. A little girl trying to bond with her distracted mother. A familial gaggle of working-class women. Tactful editing showing off the emotional range of female characters. Humor across nuanced class divides. A massive confrontation where a woman doesn't go down without a fight. You wouldn't be too wrong if you guessed the topic du jour was Sean Baker's ('Anora') oeuvre and moviemaking style. That's because you'd also be discussing the work of Shih-Ching Tsou, Baker's longtime collaborator, friend from film school, producer of his celebrated films 'Starlet,' 'The Florida Project,' and 'Tangerine,' and co-writer and co-director of 'Take Out,' Baker's lesser-known 2004 film about a Chinese food delivery worker in New York. Particularly, you'd be ruminating on the images, characters, and craft of 'Left-Handed Girl,' Tsou's Taiwan-set first feature as a solo director, debuting this week in the Critics' Week sidebar at Cannes, branded with some of Baker's hallmarks since he co-wrote and co-produced it with Tsou, and also edited it. More from IndieWire Logging Trucks, Swimming Pools, and Bathtubs, Oh My! We Fact-Checked Our Favorite 'Final Destination' Deaths 'Dossier 137' Review: Léa Drucker Carries an Ambling Police Procedural About Institutional Corruption Talking to IndieWire over Zoom a few days before flying to Cannes, Tsou frankly spoke of her childhood as inspiration for this fleet-footed, darkly funny intergenerational drama about a mother and her two daughters returning to Taipei to open a stall at one of the city's iconic night markets, even as Tsou's own mom was present off-camera in the room during the conversation. Regarding her relationship with Baker, Tsou credited her two-decade experience working with him in preparing to direct a movie set in her hometown: 'I have learned so much working with Sean, because everything in his films is hands-on. I was doing a lot of things on set, from learning the research process to talking to people from the community. We tried to tell the story as real as possible.' About the return to directing after a long gap of 20 years, she said, 'For 'Left-Handed Girl,' I had the idea since I was very young. The first time I brought it to Sean, he thought it was really interesting. So we started to write the draft together. After every other film that we finished, we would always come back to this film. Unfortunately, the time [to make it] wasn't right. It took a while to get the funding together, to get people interested. I think it's all about timing. This is the time for 'Left-Handed Girl.' This is the time for me to come back to the director's seat.' One of the central conflicts begins when the cute five-year-old daughter, I-Jing (Nina Ye), is reprimanded by her otherwise aloof grandfather for being left-handed. He warns her that the left hand is the devil's hand and wonders why her mother hasn't forced her to become dexterous with the right. The fear this instills in I-Jing — already ignored by her busy mother, nor attended to by her mercurial older sister, I-Ann, who holds a grudge against her mother and rebels by working at a shady betel nut stand — sets off a secrets-unearthing chain of events. The cultural bias favoring right-handedness, however, stands out as a fascinating myth and theme. Unsurprisingly, Tsou is left-handed. 'My mother remembers that she 'corrected' me when I was very young. That was just the time when everybody was expected to use their right hand. You don't want to hit people sitting at the wrong table. Or you don't want to get your hands dirty when you are using calligraphy pens,' she said. Is this superstition a Taiwanese or Chinese cultural belief? An idiosyncrasy of the 80s? Tsou says, 'It's interesting. I actually asked many people. This left-handed thing is actually across cultures: in Japan, in India, in Jewish culture, in German culture, they all think the left hand is the devil's hand. My grandfather also told me about it. It's to scare kids into not using it, but there is some religious basis to it too. It's not necessarily the devil of Christianity. Just something evil.' So when I-Jing starts thinking that she just might be the devil, she begins her klepto phase, stealing trinkets from the night market where she freely roams. In this, the film's arresting central stretch, Tsou's visual language — alive, kaleidoscopic colors and low-placed cameras — really pops, showcasing how all three women, but specifically the two sisters, have gone awry. Speaking to these craft aspects, Tsou says, 'We definitely want the audience to [physically] get to I-Jing's [ground] level [in the night market]. Kids probably see more color than adults, who are more used to it.' By contrast, the betel nut stand where I-Ann works is more neon, greener, and darker. 'When you get to the noodle stand, the color is different again. The color difference shows the different inner worlds and interpretations of the three women.' For Tsou, the night market is as vital a character. ''Yi Yi' is one of the Taiwanese films I really love. Having grown up in Taipei, I recognized so many places in the film. I wanted to portray Taiwan in the same way, show places that bring back the memory, but with different places [than 'Yi Yi']. The night market is chaotic, very communal. It's not just a backdrop or a setting. It actually jumps forward. Especially after living in New York for so long, when I go back to Taiwan, I actually rediscover it. I see all the things that [locals] take for granted. That was the inspiration for me to go back to Taipei. I want to show it to the whole world.' Another of Tsou's favorites is Mike Leigh's 'Secrets and Lies,' where, at the end, a group of people get together at a party, and skeletons scramble out. Similarly, the setting for the high drama at the end of 'Left-Handed Girl' is a fancy restaurant where the extended family and friends assemble to celebrate a birthday. Staying in that one location takes a bit of getting used to, given the fluid camerawork and the nifty, high-energy editing of the film's middle. Tsou agrees, and attributes this dual-pacing strategy to Baker's vision for the edit, and also to the back-and-forth written into the script, a process that began in 2012 when she and Sean arrived in Taiwan, scouted the night market which ended up in the final film, and also auditioned a five-year-old girl with whom they shot the first trailer. The story fell into place once Baker saw Taiwan firsthand. 'Cutting back and forth in the daily lives of the characters, we compare them, see how they move through the day, how they process their environments, and how their busy outer world affects their inner world. The little girl doesn't really understand anything, but you can tell she's trying to understand the meaning of adults' conversations.' Thus the film's intentional camera placement, the characters' inner journeys, and the night market's energy captured by the fluid camera, all become assets for Baker to work with. During the actual shoot — which spanned five five-day weeks — Baker could not be present since at the time due to challenges in gaining a visa to Taiwan. But he was still a significant presence. 'When we were doing camera tests,' said Tsou, 'I had conference calls with Sean. We sat down together with the DPs to tell them how we should shoot the film. We wanted the night market to be fluid. In the restaurant, we wanted to see everybody's facial reactions. We collaborated to get what Sean wanted in the end.' The actors were equally crucial to the success of the film. 'I learned casting through working on Sean's films, [beginning with] 'Starlet,' where I found the old lady in the locker room in LA. [For 'Left-Handed Girl,'] I found I-Ann on Instagram. I didn't want to do a lot of street casting, since I don't live in Taiwan, so I tried other ways, like going online or asking friends. I also went the traditional casting director route, but I didn't find anybody who's authentic. The little girl was recommended by a casting director, and she already did a lot of commercials in Taiwan, so she has a really nice presence.' Given the tumults and local challenges presented by casting, Tsou was the most surprised by Shih-Yuan Ma, the Instagram find who plays the older teenage daughter I-Ann. 'She has never acted before. So I was really surprised when she gave us such a wonderful performance. Especially during the scene when she was crying on the toilet, she cried the first time on cue. After we shot everything, she said, wait, can I do it again? I want to do it a different way. And she did. I was like, wow. She's such a natural grown actor.' Pondering on the similarity in themes of her two films 20 years apart ('Take Out' and 'Left-Handed Girl'), Tsou said, 'My mom has six sisters. Each is married to a different kind of family, some with more money than others, so when we get together, we have a weird dynamic. Sometimes, you [as an individual] end up doing everything on your own. You hope your family will help you, but in the end, everybody has their own problem. So I think it's kind of interesting to see how we're weird and also have a very real family dynamic on screen.' That dynamic, Tsou hopes, is one Taiwanese audiences will identify with. The film has already been invited to the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei. 'That's a huge launch pad for our film,' she said. On the Croisette, though, which she is so excited to visit for the premiere, she will benefit from Cannes attendees' curiosity about Baker's next project, a year after 'Anora' won the Palme d'Or, before going on to win multiple Oscars. Surely, the devil's hand is entirely the stuff of myth, and won't influence this movie's Cannes journey. 'Left-Handed Girl' premieres in Cannes Critics' Week on Thursday, April 15. Best of IndieWire The 19 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in May, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal' Martin Scorsese's Favorite Movies: 86 Films the Director Wants You to See Christopher Nolan's Favorite Movies: 44 Films the Director Wants You to See
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Edits and Co-Writes ‘Tangerine' Producer Shih-Ching Tsou's Kaleidoscopic Solo Directing Debut
Alive and brimming where most neorealist festival movies prefer the detached slow crawl that strains toward a vision of real life, Shih-Ching Tsou's solo directing debut 'Left-Handed Girl' is born from a collaboration with a longtime friend, and a filmmaker familiar to most people reading this. Sean Baker co-writes (with Tsou), produces, and edits the Taiwanese filmmaker's Cannes Critics' Week premiere after Tsou, for decades, produced Baker outings like 'Tangerine,' 'Red Rocket,' and 'The Florida Project.' A kaleidoscopic, if eventually melodramatic, portrait of a Taiwanese family returning to Taipei to set up a night market noodle shop, 'Left-Handed Girl' isn't Tsou's first at-bat as director: She co-helmed Baker's 2004 indie name-maker 'Take Out,' about a Chinese food delivery worker hustling in New York City. More from IndieWire 'Overcompensating' Review: Benito Skinner's Basic College Comedy Works Well Enough Where It Counts Logging Trucks, Swimming Pools, and Bathtubs, Oh My! We Fact-Checked Our Favorite 'Final Destination' Deaths Tsou applies the restless energy of her longtime collaborator's beloved social-realist works — portraits of men and women working against their class station to find a better living — to 'Left-Handed Girl,' which rests on the skillfully directed performance of a five-year-old girl (Nina Ye, a small child who effervescently commands the camera) in the lead. The movie, even when tracking the older daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tasi) who make up this heartwarming family trio, is always inside the tiny girls' eyes and ears, looking at the world from a place of wonderment and confusion as she tries to make sense of an adult world. The girl's grasp, though, on Mandarin and years spent living with adults and fewer children makes her already almost too mature for her own good. 'Left-Handed Girl' threatens to crash-land with a melodramatic pile-up of unearthed family secrets at a birthday banquet for the girl's grandmother, every generation engaging in histrionics that bring to life past resentments preferred to be left by all outside of Taipei and in the past. Until then, this lively feature, lensed by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao with a high-contrast, bright-lights urgency that submerges you in Taipei city life day and night, hits on a more understated, universal nerve of class conflict and the ancient traditions (including, of course, the customary misogyny) becoming less fashionable in our modern, addled times. Lens flares and twinkling glares, rooms and spaces flooded with light and color, make 'Left-Handed Girl' a visually dazzling experience, as we're swept off via moped into the streaking sights and sounds of Taipei. I-Jing (Nina Ye) arrives with her mother and older sister from rural Taiwan, back in the hometown she never knew as an even smaller child, possible economic opportunity awaiting the fractured family in the capital city. They reconnect with Shu-Fen's mother, the grandma of I-ann and I-Jing, who hasn't seen any of them for years. In Taiwanese-traditional matriarchal fashion, the grandmother starts fretting over twenty-something I-Ann's (the filmmakers found Ma on Instagram) looser way of dress. I-Jing and I-Ann's mother Shu-Fen (Tsai) is in Taipei to open up a noodle shop on rented dime — and is almost immediately behind on the payments. I-Ann, who once dreamed of university life but is now shackled to being a surrogate mother to her younger sister, is willful and rebellious. She takes up work at a betel nut stand in the same night market — betel nut being a stimulant, classifiable drug in Taiwan — that stand itself fronting as a tobacco shop, engaging in listless sexual encounters with its frontman. There are, inevitably and perhaps predictably, dire consequences here, as signaled when I-Ann has to run to the street to puke during her shift. Unexpected pregnancy is a classic melodramatic trope in any movie, one that never seems to feel less shoved in, though just hold on, because the 'Left-Handed Girl' script makes I-Ann's curveball an integral part of its story. Meanwhile, I-Jing is left to her own devices, roaming the night market and the city, especially while her mother is busy raising (and barely) the medical and funeral costs for I-Jing's father, suddenly in hospital and unable to speak or move. Again, it's a lot of melodrama thrust in at once, as if this movie couldn't just let their characters move naturally through the story world, instead throwing plot hijinks at them to make their return to Taipei all the more fraught with disaster. As if showing face in a city you used to live in, and having to start up a business there on day one, weren't hard enough. 'Left-Handed Girl' routinely returns to the cultural idea of saving and/or losing face, how so much of the Taiwanese culture here is about putting on a front where our deepest traumas and disasters are buried under the floor ever beneath us. But there's little room for the past to hide, as the apartment I-Jing and her sister and mother move into, as I-Ann observes, is 'smaller than the photo.' No one has any personal space, so how would the ghosts of the past have anywhere else to hide, either? Also making I-Jing's integration into Taipei life a challenge is her left-handedness, amid a cultural bias that prefers the right hand as much as other arbitrary decorum. Her surly grandfather warns that the left hand is 'the devil's hand,' which leads I-Jing to suspect she might be possessed by evil itself when that very left hand leads to a most unfortunate slapstick incident involving her adorable pet meerkat, perhaps her only friend in this lonely world. That very left hand also takes up casual petty shoplifting, and if you were ever a small child who casually purloined a trinket or two from a gift shop, you'll understand the frustrations Tsou and Baker mine from her bemused sudden life of petty crime. If only 'Left-Handed Girl' trusted its small-scale, intrinsic human dramas enough to avoid the film's wildly over-the-top conclusion at a birthday banquet celebrating I-Jing's grandmother. Screeching and yelling, jilted lovers, and generational disappointment flood into a finale as theatrical as a Broadway stage play despite affecting performances, wrapping up too rashly to consider how all of what just went down is about to deeply traumatize the young I-Jing for life. As much as 'Left-Handed Girl' is about the past flashflooding into the present, even while those the past keeps its hook in try to make a new life, the film is less about the future and what's next for I-Jing and her family. Tsou and Baker open a fresh window that's immediate, as cluttered as it is by superimposed panes of the before, onto the now of this core group. But the film does leave them on better ground to stand on than they started, as the most hope-filled of classic melodramas do. What's culturally touched on here will be recognizable to Taiwanese audiences, how the forward motion of daily lives is tamped down by expectations that are ancient in scope. Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, 'Left-Handed Girl' still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance: It feels more like a third or fourth film, but that's also because it basically is, Tsou having not just shadowed Baker over the years, but having been directly immersed and embedded in the process on his directorial films. The imprimatur of Baker, a lifelong supporter of rising storytellers and people on the margins, will draw audiences to this touching film, but they'll walk away with the lasting impression of Tsou's own singular perspective — one infused with color and furiously energetic detail — instead. 'Left-Handed Girl' premiered in the 2025 Cannes Critics' Week. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Le Pacte is handling sales. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
