Girl

In an amazing career spent collaborating with some of the world’s greatest auteurs, Taiwanese actor Shu Qi (TIFF ’15’s The Assassin) has brought a captivating presence to her performances, with complex emotions often heightened through restraint.

With Girl, her first film as writer-director, that same sensibility is utilized behind the camera, crafting a coming-of-age tale at once harrowing and beguiling, its attention on the beauty that lies waiting even in life’s difficult moments.

Growing up in a struggling household with abusive parents, Lin Xiaoli, just entering puberty, has learned to keep her head down. She looks after her little sister, often taking the brunt of their parents’ chain of vitriol: her father comes home drunk and attacks her mother, then her mother takes out her resentment on Xiaoli.

But things begin to change when Xiaoli meets fellow student Li Lili who, though also from a troubled home, has adopted the opposite approach to domestic chaos: she rebels, skipping class, wearing makeup, smoking cigarettes, and encouraging Xiaoli to challenge her family’s status quo. Xiaoli begins looking for a way out — and wonders if her beleaguered mother mightn’t come with her.

Shu often films from a distance, allowing us to see characters in their environments, and heightens our sense of place through delicate attention to sounds: the whir of a fan, the buzz of insects, the zipper that seals off Xiaoli’s tiny sleeping area. Unsurprisingly, she elicits beautiful performances from every member of her cast. Girl is rich with details gained from lived experience, making it an instant classic and an auspicious debut.

GIOVANNA FULVI