'Girl' Mandarin Vision Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Outside her home country of Taiwan, actress Shu Qi is probably best known by two types of moviegoers: fans of arthouse master Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose films Millennium Mambo, Three Times and The Assassin were marked by Shu's mesmerizing presence; or action junkies who love flicks like The Transporter and Jackie Chan's Chinese Zodiac, in which she showcased her chops as a versatile performer of comedy and stunts. Either way, it's hard to forget Shu once you've seen her on screen. The 49-year-old star has now decided to step behind the camera with her feature debut, Girl (Nühai), delivering a deeply subjective and occasionally jarring portrait of a teenager growing up in the 1980s. Impressively performed but also unwieldy and, at times, a bit unedited, the film offers a raw look at domestic abuse, poverty and alcoholism that's darker than anything Shu herself ever starred in. The actress deserves credit for making something so bravely bleak, though it's hard to see this Venice premiere getting wide play. Related Stories Movies Julian Schnabel's Big Swing 'In the Hand of Dante' Gets Exuberant Embrace in Venice Movies 'In the Hand of Dante' Review: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler Star in Julian Schnabel's Bonkers, Wildly Uneven Literary Adaptation Girl The Bottom Line Honest - and hard to watch. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Roy Chiu, 9m88, Bai Xiao-YingDirector, screenwriter: Shu Qi 2 hours 5 minutes You can see Hou's influence in the movie's immersive, enigmatic atmosphere, which plunges us into a working-class Taiwanese household grappling with the constant threat of violence. Much of what we experience is seen through the eyes of Li Hsiao-Lee (Bai Xiao-Ying), a taciturn adolescent who takes care of her younger sister (Lai Yu-Fei) and keeps to herself at school, where she spends more time in the infirmary than the classroom. At home, she tries to avoid her moody and often overtly hostile mom, Chuan (Taiwanese singer 9m88), who works in a hair salon by day while handcrafting fake flower bouquets at night for extra money. But Hsiao-Lee especially keeps clear of her father, Chiang (Roy Chiu), an auto mechanic who stumbles into the apartment dead drunk after work, ready to start a fight or possibly do much worse. Shu spends lots of time painting this sordid picture of broken family life, in a movie that's more of a languid coming-of-age chronicle peppered by sudden outbursts of cruelty or brutality than a classic narrative. Shooting scenes in wide or medium shots that sometimes break into Hsiao-Lee's harrowing point-of-view, cinematographer Yu Jing-Pin depicts a world without much color or hope, while sets by Huang Mei-Ching and Tu Shuo-Feng emphasize a sad and impoverished existence. The film can drone on without much momentum, trapping us in the gloomy apartment as Hsiao-Lee constantly gets punished by her mom, while living in nightmarish fear of a dad who may be sexually abusing her. Shu lets those home scenes play out in their painful entirety, seemingly uncut in spots. One unbearable sequence has Chiang coming back angry in the middle of the day and suddenly raping Chuan in their bedroom. Even if it's artfully made and grippingly acted - 9m88 and Chiu are convincing as two of the meanest parents ever seen in an arthouse movie - Girl can be a tedious exercise to sit through, especially in its early sections. Things take a significantly better, or at least a lighter, turn when Hsiao-Lee crosses path with Li Li-Li (Audrey Lin), a rebellious Taiwanese-American classmate who immediately takes a liking to the quiet girl. At that point, both Hsiao-Lee's life and our perspective open up toward something more hopeful, even if plenty of turmoil - including another unbearable scene in which Chiang nearly strangles Chuan to death - continues back home. One of the film's best sequences features the two teens sneaking out of school, stealing denim skirts and going to a video club with private viewing booths. The place feels more like a sleazy peep show venue, and it very well could be. But Shu shows how it represents freedom both in a cultural (the girls smoke cigarettes and dance around to pop music) and personal sense, allowing Hsiao-Lee to momentarily emancipate herself from the home front. Scattered elliptical flashbacks give us glimpses into the tough childhood Chuan led before becoming a mother, in a cycle of poverty and abuse that has continued unbroken until now. "Life is easier for kids nowadays," she says in yet another dig at her daughter, and that may be true compared to the horrors beforehand. Girl is unrelenting in its vision of a society, or at least a particular family, dominated by abusive men who punish the women in their lives, causing them to bec