Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, but always it’s hard to be a girl in Taiwanese star Shu Qi‘s sincere but unwieldy directorial debut “Girl.” Tracing a few turbulent months in the life of a Taipei schoolgirl in the late 1980s, the film witnesses how, under cover of her docility, she gathers the strength for some much-needed rebellion against the strictures of a poverty-blighted childhood and the dysfunctional parents who visit on her various flavors of abuse and neglect. It’s not new narrative territory, and the execution falters at key moments, but as a director Shu shows a seriousness of purpose almost as unflinching as her compassion for the children caught in the endless loop-the-loop of patriarchal violence, from which there can be no rescue, only the vague, desperate hope of a self-engineered escape.
“Don’t touch. Dirty.” These are the first words we hear from sullen teenager Hsiao Lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) as she drags her heels on her way back from school. She directs them at her skittish younger sister (Lai Yu-Fei) who is poking her fingers through the wire fencing enclosing the overpass they use to get home. The symbolism of this moment will soon become clear — there are some for whom the best view of the free, blue sky comes through bars, as those of a cage or a cell. A few years her more curious, outgoing sister’s senior, Hsiao Lee has already given up even reaching for it.
At home the family dynamic is sketched quickly and bluntly. Hsiao Lee’s mother Chuan (Taiwanese hip-hop musician 9m88, pronounced jiu-m-ba-ba), who works in a beauty salon and occasionally hostesses at nighttime mahjong games, regards her elder daughter with an absence of affection bordering on hostility. Comparatively, she dotes on her younger child, who accepts this as the natural order of things, the way little kids do.
Chuan’s husband Chiang (Roy Chiu) is a whole other level of terrible parent. Stumbling drunk up the stairs of their squalid apartment after nightly boozing and gambling sessions, he beats Chuan for wearing make-up one day, and berates her unattractiveness when she doesn’t the day after. He appears indifferent to his younger daughter altogether, which is preferable to his abuse of Hsiao Lee, hinted at darkly by the girl’s habit of sleeping fearfully inside in a cheap zip-up wardrobe. Sometimes Hsiao Lee imagines his hands reaching for her through the wardrobe’s flimsy fabric covering.
School is a haven from these terrors, although Hsiao Lee is often faint from hunger and exhaustion. But one of the few respites Shu’s screenplay grants us from the downbeat tone is observation of the offhand kindnesses that children can sometimes extend to each other. There’s the boy in Hsiao Lee’s class who is usually tasked with accompanying her to and from the nurse’s office when she has one of her spells. And eventually, there’s an actual friend in the shape of Lili (Audrey Lin), a worldly new transfer student who takes Hsiao Lee under her wing. Partly it’s so she can have an acolyte with whom she can dress up, hang out and meet boys. But it’s also partly a kindness she extends to a mortified Hsiao Lee, who withdraws even further after a particularly humiliating incident when her mother comes to school and, within sight and earshot of the whole class, slaps her and shouts at her for forgetting her lunch.
The heat and stifling humidity of a Taiwanese summer is well-evoked by DP Yu Jing-Pin’s energetic cinematography and the authentically cluttered production design by Huang Mei-Ching. Fans blow listlessly everywhere, except on the special (male) customers in the beauty shop, for whom they’ll turn on the AC. And there are incidental moments that illuminate the themes of misogyny and inherited female shame: the casual groping Chuan endures with a smile from one of her patrons; Hsiao Lee asking her sister why she jokes with the classmates who put her down, and the younger girl heartbreakingly replying, “What am I going to do, cry?” And there are occasional hints that there may be an element of tough-love maternal protectiveness in Chuan’s constant bullying of her elder child. “You’ll end up like me,” she scolds at one point, indicating that much of her mistreatment of the girl is a projection of her own inherited self-loathing.
But there is always a danger with this kind of heart-on-sleeve filmmaking that its flaws will play as plainly as its virtues, and while Shu’s instincts as a storyteller are solid — and highlighting the plight of women caught in a poverty trap sprung with particular violence by Taiwanese patriarchy is an urgent endeavor — her confidence as a filmmaker has yet to catch up.
At over two hours in length, a tighter edit could have clarified certain aspects. There are flashbacks to Chuan’s own unhappy adolescence, which are a necessary attempt to account for, if never excuse, her mistreatment of Hsiao Lee, but which initially are hard to place within the film’s timeline. There’s an epilogue in which we revisit Hsiao Lee as a young adult that hides rather too much of her transformation process in its “several years later”-style cut. And there are a few surreal sequences that suggest the filmmaker’s ambition for an expressivity that goes beyond strictly presentational social realism. But when the basics of character differentiation and time frame have not been properly established, these flourishes can create confusion rather than complexity.
Still, in its emotional candor and a finale that lands with surprising grace on the peculiarly touching and oddly relatable moment of tears shed over — and partially into — a bowl of noodles flavoured with years-after-the-fact forgiveness, “Girl” indicates that its director has a valuable perspective on the long-game arc of redemption available to those whose early years are a gauntlet to be run, rather than a formative process to be cherished. Just like its embattled and traumatised protagonist, “Girl” properly comes into its own only when girlhood is gone, and its survivors start to see each other for the women they have become in spite of it.
