‘Girl’ review: Actress Shu Qi’s 1980s-set directorial debut explores childhood trauma

Dir/scr: Shu Qi. Taiwan. 2025. 125 minutes.

Petite, pensive and diffident, schoolgirl Lin Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) views the world with worry and trepidation. And for good cause: the older of two daughters of the bitter, broken Chuan (9m88) and the abusive, alcoholid Chiang (Roy Chiu), Hsiao-lee finds herself bearing the brunt of generational cycles of violence. However a friendship with one other lady, Li-Li (Audrey Lin), who shares her title and a number of the similar sad childhood experiences, gives her a launch from the relentless distress of her house life. Unflinching in its portrayal of home abuse and vivid in its depiction of Keelung, Taiwan in 1988, actress Shu Qi’s directorial debut incorporates moments of bleak magnificence and affecting rawness. However the ambition of the movie’s interwoven time traces just isn’t at all times matched by its execution, significantly within the image’s considerably muddled first act.

Shu has an acute eye for element

A daily collaborator of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (she starred in Millennium Mambo, Three Instances and The Murderer), Shu Qi turned her hand to writing and directing at his suggestion. And Hou’s affect is obvious within the image, which has one thing of the plush, saturated color palette – teals, golds and tangerines determine prominently – that made Millennium Mambo such a putting work. The star energy of Shu, who most lately appeared in Bi Gan’s Cannes Particular Jury Prize-winner Resurrection, will probably be a promoting level for the image, which screens in Toronto and Busan following its Venice predominant competitors bow. It could not, nonetheless, be distinctive and guaranteed sufficient to maneuver far past area of interest arthouse theatrical publicity.

This can be a image that beneficial properties confidence and momentum because it unfolds, with the primary 20 minutes or so probably the most disorientating and demanding. Schoolgirls go about their each day enterprise, shot in such tight focus that the concrete city sprawl round them is lowered to an impressionistic blur of colors. A woman asks permission from her father, a labourer in a area, to check at her good friend’s home within the night – he tells her to neglect her research and assist with the cooking. One other lady – Hsiao-lee – zips herself into the PVC cowl of her garments storer, a plastic cocoon that gives scant safety from the drunken, lurching rages of her father.

It takes some time to unpick these two story strands: it’s not maybe as clear because it may very well be that the 2 ladies exist in two separate time durations. One is Hsiao-lee, in 1988; the opposite, it regularly turns into clear, is her mom, Chuan, as a youngster someday beforehand. Each ladies battle with their relationships with merciless and overbearing fathers.

There’s a touch in a fleeting scene within the early a part of the movie that one thing horrible may need occurred to Chuan as a lady, one thing that derailed her subsequent life and which trickles down into her remedy of her older daughter. And in Hsiao-lee’s paralysed worry of her father, there’s a suggestion that his abuse would possibly transcend verbal and bodily. The precise nature of Hsiao-lee’s depressing house life doesn’t should be overtly acknowledged to make for uncomfortable and unsettling viewing.

Very regularly, Shu threads collectively the story parts – Chuan’s early trauma is linked to her deeply sad marriage to Chiang, and to her overt cruelty to poor Hsiao-lee. Singer and songwriter 9m88 brings texture to a personality who’s as a lot a sufferer as she is her daughter’s tormentor; Chiu, in the meantime has much less to work with within the one-note character of Chiang, who’s perpetually both drunk or hungover and is totally charmless in both state. 

A distinction to the melancholy tone of a lot of the image is supplied by the character of Lili. A brand new lady at Hsiao-lee’s faculty, who has moved again to Taiwan from the US following her mother and father’ break up, Lili is bouyant regardless of her troubled household background. She unilaterally pursues a friendship with the glum, silent Hsiao-lee, giving her a primary style of rebel and dragging her alongside for misadventures with Keelung’s scooter-riding dangerous boys 

The place Shu is most profitable is in fleshing out the character of the time and the place. She has an acute eye for element. Each floor within the cramped household residence is taken up with plastic tat – synthetic flowers, toys, decorations – which Chuan assembles to eke out a meagre dwelling. The sunshine within the dour little flat has an virtually mildewed, musty high quality. In distinction, the world exterior, as soon as Hsiao-lee has Li-li as her information, is thrilling and vividly colored. The digital camera captures the vitality and bustle of a metropolis that’s bursting with life and a promise of higher instances simply out of attain from the jail of Hsiao-lee’s household life.