Sean Baker, not untypically, returned to the scene of recent triumph accompanied by only modest hoopla. In May 2024 the director’s film Anora began its run to Oscar glory by winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Twelve months after that he turned up in the quieter Critics’ Week strand – the section that gave us Aftersun, with Paul Mescal, in 2022 – as one of the writers and producers of Shih-Ching Tsou’s lovely, pacy, characterful Left-Handed Girl.
The two have been collaborating for more than 20 years. Way back in 2004 they shared directing, writing and producing credits on the well-reviewed Take Out. Tsou has remained by Baker’s side for critical hits such as Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket. She now rejoins a winner of four Oscars for a very personal project.
“The Palme d’Or was obviously a really eye-opening moment for us,” Baker says. “Flying home from Cannes last year, I was getting texts from people saying, ‘Get ready for the next six months of your life. It’s going to be awards-season hell.’ And I said, ‘Really? This is an awards film?’ Well, we’re back in it now!
“It’s not hell this time. There was pressure as director of Anora. Now I am just here to celebrate Shih-Ching. It’s a wonderful movie. It’s a totally different vibe.”
RM Block
He tells no lie. And it would be wrong to let Baker’s current renown overshadow Tsou’s achievement. This is very much her story. Left-Handed Girl, which has been picked up by Netflix for streaming, follows Shu-Fen, a single mother, as, with her two daughters, she readjusts to life in Taipei following some time in the Taiwanese countryside.
The film is greedily engorged with life in that huge city. Street markets. Buzzing scooters. Fiery chatter. But there is an intimate trauma at the picture’s heart. Played with bewildering poise by the nine-year-old Nina Ye, I-Jing, the younger of Shu-Fen’s daughters, falls into confusion when confronted with a prohibitive superstition.
“Left-Handed Girl was the very first idea I had,” Tsou, who grew up in Taipei, says. “I called Sean and I told him what my grandfather told me in high school. He saw me use a knife with my left hand. And he said, ‘The left hand is Devil’s hand.’ And you were not supposed to use it. I always remembered that. I told Sean about it and he thought, well, that sounds like a really good idea for a movie.”
That is, indeed, how Baker remembers it.
“Yes, I saw potential,” he says. “And in other stories Shih-Ching told me. I thought there was a lot of potential to fictionalise those stories and write a very cool family drama together that would really celebrate the night markets of Taipei. She introduced me to the night markets, and I thought, wow, this is such a cinematic setting!”
We keep the techniques that work. To tell you the truth, when you have more money there are more restrictions
— Sean Baker
This was two decades ago. They constantly plotted to get the film on screen. But the time never seemed right. In 2010 they made another concerted effort, but more life (and other movies) intervened. The success of the Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, in 2017, gave them one more boost. But it still took another eight years for Left-Handed Girl to make it to Critics’ Week.
“It was just the timing of everything,” Tsou says. “I needed experience – needed to collect all the different film-making skills. Working on this film is a huge collective, collaborative process. I did a lot of things like street casting, location scouting, costume design, everything. I felt it was necessary for me to become a good storyteller.”
So take us back to how this remarkable partnership came together. After finishing college in Taiwan, Tsou made her way to New York for a master’s in media studies at the New School (alma mater of Tennessee Willliams, James Baldwin and Marlon Brando).
“I ran into Sean at an editing class,” she says. “He had already finished his first feature. He was editing the film. We started talking and realised we like the same type of movies. So we loved Dogme 95 and a lot of world cinema – Korean cinema.
“And British social realists,” Baker adds. “Mike Leigh was a big deal. We connected over those films.”
You can, I guess, see a bit of Mike Leigh and Dogme 95 – the Danish back-to-basics movement associated with Lars von Trier – in their films, but there is something brasher about them, something funkier, something if not more American then certainly less European.
One linking feature is a connection with the streets and the people who walk there. Tangerine, shot on iPhones in 2015, went among the transgender sex workers of West Hollywood. The Florida Project connected with the troubled residents in a downmarket motel. Now, with Left-Handed Girl, they are mixing with locals in the night markets of Taipei.
I wonder have the techniques changed. The technology around them has altered, but the films still have the same cement-and-street-grime ambience. Just look how Anora captured the atmosphere of Russian-speaking South Brooklyn.
“We keep the techniques that work,” Baker says. “To tell you the truth, when you have more money there are more restrictions. So it becomes hard to do these sort of guerrilla-film-making tactics that we’re used to. But Left-Handed Girl was very much in the same vein as those earlier films, because it was a smaller film. Shih-Ching had ... not a small crew, exactly, but a tight crew in Taipei. They really applied a lot of those techniques that we used on those earlier movies.”
You can’t fake that closeness to the setting. The mobile camera is floating around genuine citizens in Taipei. We meet the young people selling betel nuts. We bump up against hustlers on the eternal make.
“We wanted to go into the community,” Tsou says. “We want to work with them. We want to become one of them inside the night market. All locations are real locations, even the betel-nut stands. As we were shooting they were still selling betel nuts. They were still doing business as we were shooting.”
“That’s a big deal,” Baker says. “That’s something we started off doing. We applied it to the other films we did: Starlet, Tangerine. It’s a big deal. We were shooting in that doughnut shop in Tangerine. We never controlled that thing. It was a live, operating doughnut shop as we were shooting.”
You need to be organised to shoot that way. You also need a strong understanding between the crew. Baker and Tsou radiate different energies – he is open and laid-back; she has a more furrowed intensity – but, like so many long-time colleagues, they have an eerie ability to complete each other’s sentences.
The relationship moves into a new phase here (or, more accurately, returns to a much earlier one). This is the first time Shih-Ching Tsou has directed since Take Out, in 2004.
I ask, facetiously, if Baker, current holder of the Oscar for best director and best picture, was able to resist the urge to poke his nose where it didn’t belong.
“It was interesting,” he says. “This is the first time I’ve done this, where we wrote something together and then I took the total step back. I wasn’t even present for a day of principal photography. I was going into Anora at the time. I knew I had full faith in her. After 20 years of working together and seeing everything that she had done on our films, I just knew she was going to pull this off.”
Baker now finds himself in an interesting place. He is only the third film-maker in history to have won the Palme d’Or and the best-picture Oscar for the same film. That success is bound to bring a deal of attention. Is there a temptation to take a larger budget and move away from the lo-fi aesthetic?
“We were just talking about all the limitations of low-budget, independent film-making,” he says. “I think that those limitations are what have created our films and have made them unique and, perhaps, in some people’s eyes, good. We want to stick to that. So I am trying my best to continue like that even though I know that I might be able to get more money. I’m a bit of a masochist.”
So we won’t next be seeing his squillion-dollar blockbuster?
“Why fix what’s not broken?”
Left-Handed Girl streams on Netflix from Friday, November 28th
