Within the opening scene of Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Lady, 5-year-old I-Jing lifts a kaleidoscope to her eye. The automotive’s inside, the freeway speeding by, and the shimmer of Taipei on the horizon change into refracted along with her mom and sister in gold, blue, and inexperienced. From the outset to its closing scene, the movie—which is Taiwan’s submission for the 2026 Academy Awards and is now streaming on Netflix—invitations us to think about what’s handed down, warped, and shared throughout three generations of Taiwanese girls.
There may be Shu-Fen, who has moved her daughters again to Taipei to arrange a noodle stand in a bustling night time market after a protracted seeming exile within the countryside. Along with her is I-Ann, a knife-eyed, defiant 20-something who searches for a way of value after lacking out on faculty. Lastly, there may be I-Jing, the youngest, who experiences Taipei in two paradoxical settings: the dizzying, thriving neon of the night time market and the stultifying fluorescent lights of her grandparents’ residence.
Within the opening scene of Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Lady, 5-year-old I-Jing lifts a kaleidoscope to her eye. The automotive’s inside, the freeway speeding by, and the shimmer of Taipei on the horizon change into refracted along with her mom and sister in gold, blue, and inexperienced. From the outset to its closing scene, the movie—which is Taiwan’s submission for the 2026 Academy Awards and is now streaming on Netflix—invitations us to think about what’s handed down, warped, and shared throughout three generations of Taiwanese girls.
There may be Shu-Fen, who has moved her daughters again to Taipei to arrange a noodle stand in a bustling night time market after a protracted seeming exile within the countryside. Along with her is I-Ann, a knife-eyed, defiant 20-something who searches for a way of value after lacking out on faculty. Lastly, there may be I-Jing, the youngest, who experiences Taipei in two paradoxical settings: the dizzying, thriving neon of the night time market and the stultifying fluorescent lights of her grandparents’ residence.
It’s within the latter that I-Jing learns from her grandfather that utilizing her left hand—a superstition of older generations—is taboo. Sensing I-Jing’s confusion, her grandfather shifts techniques, telling her that her left hand is the satan’s hand and that she should keep away from utilizing it in any respect prices.
What follows is a traditional infantile caper. Relatively than avoiding her left hand, I-Jing begins utilizing it to shoplift from different night time market stalls, claiming it’s the satan’s doing, not her personal. However when she absentmindedly tosses a ball off her residence balcony along with her left hand—sending her pet meerkat plummeting to its dying—she is jolted into believing her grandfather’s archaic warning. Ultimately, I-Jing’s theft catches up along with her, and she or he is pressured to admit her dangerous conduct to her sister. As an alternative of scolding her, I-Ann marches her to their grandparents’ residence and calls for that their grandfather take again his admonition. She scolds him, arguing that his prejudice in opposition to left-handedness is as backward—and doubtlessly as traumatizing—because the now-defunct, centuries-old custom of breaking and binding women’ ft.
It’s this line that throws into sharp reduction what Left-Handed Lady is basically about. Regardless of its title, the movie isn’t all that fascinated by I-Jing’s left-handedness, besides as an avenue to inject hijinks into a movie which may in any other case be described as poignant. Relatively, Left-Handed Lady locations its emphasis squarely on “Lady.” It explores the struggles and indignities girls face and the methods through which society is constructed on their subjugation—from historical practices comparable to foot-binding to the horror and common panic of an sudden, undesirable being pregnant.
Ye in Left-Handed Lady. Left-Handed Lady Manufacturing Co./Netflix
Contemplate Shu-Fen. In certainly one of her first scenes, she negotiates with a landlord for a spot to arrange her noodle stand. The owner smiles, encouraging her to take the big, central house at the same time as she politely inquires about one thing smaller. He later warns her that his hire deadlines are stringent: If she doesn’t pay on time, he’ll discover another person to take her spot. This scene is Chekhovian in its foreshadowing; not lengthy after, Shu-Fen finds herself buried in debt after overlaying her late estranged husband’s medical and funeral bills as a result of she is his solely residing relative. The burden of gendered caregiving, even for a neglectful partner, causes her to almost lose her solely supply of earnings.
I-Ann, too, acts as a vessel by way of which we’d see the injustices of feminine life. In her work as a betel-nut magnificence, she dons tiny miniskirts and strappy tank tops, promoting nuts from a roadside stand to drivers who chew the nuts for his or her stimulant and narcotic results. Whether or not or not she is being sexually exploited within the job itself is up for interpretation. I-Ann appears absolutely answerable for her option to work there, hoping to earn greater than her mom does on the noodle stall. She additionally appears to be an energetic participant in her sexual relationship with the stand’s proprietor, although a scene the place he ogles one other woman whereas I-Ann listlessly performs fellatio on him makes it clear that their relationship is an uneven one.
There’s no scarcity of different misogynistic indignities. Shu-Fen and her sisters, for example, plan a sixtieth birthday celebration for his or her mom, just for her to provide the credit score to their brother, who contributed nothing to the hassle. In a household argument, it’s additionally revealed that Shu-Fen’s dad and mom are leaving their Taipei residence to that son of their will, even though he appears to do little or no to look after them in contrast along with his sisters. Later, when Shu-Fen is unable to pay hire for her noodle stall, the person working the neighboring stall presents to lend her cash. Whereas it’s clear he has a crush on her and desires to assist, she refuses the money, not sure if accepting the mortgage would include strings hooked up.
There’s an plain heavy-handedness to all this. At one level, I-Ann all of a sudden lurches to the curb and vomits profusely, a transparent signal of her undesirable being pregnant. The revelation is sort of anticlimactic—inevitable, even. How may a movie attest to the struggles of ladies with out together with the tried-and-true “Oh no, I’m pregnant!” second? Mercifully, Tsou doesn’t enable this plot system to pull unnecessarily—there aren’t any lengthy sequences of I-Ann waffling over what to do or any tortured scenes of a younger lady navigating abortion. As an alternative, the being pregnant is used to power a dramatic, propulsive confrontation within the movie’s penultimate scene.
One can’t assist however marvel if this narrative clumsiness isn’t the affect of Sean Baker’s involvement as co-writer, producer, and editor of the movie. Greatest recognized for his movies Anora and The Florida Venture, Baker has an apparent fixation with the plight of poor girls. Although it’s all the time tough to assign authorship in such a collaborative medium as movie, the enhancing of sure scenes—notably the ending—appear to needlessly emphasize tragedy whereas undermining the chance for extra complicated portrayals of its topics.
Left-Handed Lady is strongest when it takes an ambivalent or matter-of-fact method to its characters and their plights, because it does when paying rapturous homage to Taipei from a toddler’s-eye digital camera that drips in wonderment or indulging within the occasional visible joke, comparable to when I-Jing contemplates a meat cleaver, clearly questioning if she ought to cut off her left hand.
One of many few social points that the movie treats with humor and subtlety is that Shu-Fen’s mom appears to be embroiled in a human trafficking ring, utilizing her U.S. visa to ferry Chinese language girls into the USA illegally. Drops for visas and passports are carried out in an empty membership the place an older couple practices their tango below lurid Christmas lights. Shu-Fen’s mom retains bringing again copious quantities of nutritional vitamins from the USA to present to her daughters, who unequivocally don’t need them. At one level, the traffickers need to ask Shu-Fen’s mom to maintain her fixed chatter to a minimal; certainly one of their shoppers complained that she talked the complete 15-hour flight to the States.
Superbly acted and gorgeously shot, Left-Handed Lady is free, free, and unhindered when it permits its characters a bit little bit of respiratory room, specializing in the genuine, typically ridiculous contradictions of being a completely realized particular person trapped in a black-and-white world.
Ye and Ma in Left-Handed Lady. Left-Handed Lady Manufacturing Co./Netflix
So, what does it wish to say concerning the feminine expertise in up to date Taiwan? Should you have been to look solely on the hardships confronted by the protagonists, you’ll be forgiven for pondering the movie has a particularly pessimistic view of what it means to outlive as a lady in a misogynistic society.
But there are moments the place Tsou appears to trace at one thing transcendent. It comes by way of most fantastically in a sequence the place I-Ann leads I-Jing by way of the night time market, encouraging her to apologize and return all of the objects she shoplifted. What may have been a scene heavy on scoldings and shaming as an alternative unfolds right into a grace-filled, actually transferring succession of adults who forgive I-Jing, telling her to not do it once more. All of the whereas I-Ann drops her facade of world-weary jadedness and smiles at her sister with love. Scenes comparable to this, the place characters are allowed to stay within the aftermath of their struggles, recommend that there’s, maybe, a life past the disgrace girls are so typically pressured to endure.
The night time market, the household dancing within the noodle stall, the numerous close-ups of I-Jing’s palms intertwined along with her mom’s—Left-Handed Lady is making an attempt to inform us one thing about how girls may expertise freedom even below the burdens of misogyny, if solely they may present up as their most sincere, metaphorically “left-handed” selves. In these moments, the movie actually sings, providing up a view of ladies’s lives in Taiwan that’s without delay important and filled with hope.
