Left-Handed Girl: a cry of rage and liberating revolt (critic)
Co-written by Sean Baker, this first long hectic on three women of three generations plagued by the patriarchy of the Taiwanese company, reveals a director to follow.
It’s been over 20 years that Shih Ching Tsou and Sean Baker work together. She produced many of her films and co-signed with him the documentary Take Out. No surprise therefore to find Anora’s man at the co-writing of his first solo long long-inspired long-in-law which, all dialogue with The Florida Project, reveals first and foremost an original voice. We follow a mother and her two daughters who came back to live in the bubbling everyday of Taipei.
The first opened a canteen in a night market, its elder bumps in a miteous shop and sleeps with its boss while keeping an eye on her very stretch 5 year old sister. Three women that we quickly perceive at the heart of financial difficulties ready to swallow them at any time. And the men around them (father, ex-husband, son …) seem only there to watch them agitating without this mother-coloring.
The great success of the film is due in this double contradictory movement: a race against the frantic watch weighed down by the weight of Taiwanese patriarchal traditions. With the same care taken in an all-in-velocity realization as a particularly remarkable writing in its management of the revelation of the secrets that underlie this story, to a masterful scene of meals- settlement of accounts which alone justifies the discovery of this award-winning film at the Critics’ Week. Do not trust his apparent malice and cute, Left-Handed Girl is first and foremost a cry of rage and liberating revolt.
Of Shih- Ching Tsou. With Janel Tsai, Nina Ye, Shi- Yuan Ma … Duration: 1h48. Released September 17, 2025
