Taiwanese-Hong Kong star Shu Qi’s debut feature film, Girl, has a way of leaving one gasping for breath, quite often at that. A smothering, oppressive air hangs heavy as the film explores the cyclical nature of violence and abuse, its unremitting ways and how it acquires newer shapes and forms across generations in a family than disappear altogether. Set in the late 80s, in the port city of Keelung in Taiwan, it is centred on Lin Hsiao-Lee (Xiao-Ying Bai), an introverted and withdrawn girl, quiet even amid her classmates and friends. It’s a joyless family that she has grown up in, giving her no reason to smile. An inheritance from her mother Chuan (9m88) whose brutal past and present appear to have seeped into and darkened Hsiao Lee’s reality as well. An alcoholic father Chiang (Roy Chiu), regularly turns brutal with her mother, who in turn takes her frustrations out on her. Opposites are known to attract. So, a lively, gregarious new student. Li-Lili (Pin-Tung Lin), quite unlike Hsiao-Lee’s own diffident self, strikes a friendship with her. Despite coming from a broken home herself, she has learnt to rebel  against things than taking them lying down. She makes Hsiao-Lee bunk classes, wear makeup, visit video clubs and smoke cigarettes like her. She personifies all that lies suppressed within Hsiao-Lee, the dreams that never could turn into reality, the bright colours that got overpowered by the daunting blacks and greys. It’s Li-Lili who gives Hsiao-Lee some moments of joy and a release and relief to her repressed self. It’s with her that you find her sport a rare smile, at the karaoke for instance. A coming-of-age tale at its most harrowing, Girl has admittedly been influenced by the works of Taiwanese f ilmmaker and Shu Qi’s idol, Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is not plot driven so much as an exploration of inner lives of characters and their relationships. A slice of a nightmarish adolescent life with one clash leading on to another fight in a home that is a literal battleground. While Shu Qi presents the ugly reality as a distant observer, there is a sense of urgency, immediacy and detailing that make for an acutely experiential cinema. A lived experience that is especially triggering for women in the blood curdling moments of domestic violence like the scene when her drunk father smashes household items and hits her mother making Hsiao-Lee zip herself up inside the closet, her sleeping area, turning it into her safe space of sorts. The production design of Max Huang and Shuo-Feng Tu and the camera of Jing-Pin Yu go hand in hand in building the ugly reality, the cheek by jowl life in the small apartment and the sense of ominousness, doom and fear within it. The film boasts of some remarkable performances. Clearly, the beauty you see in the world is the one you carry within. You can find it in bad times and lose it even when the going is good. And then, as in the case of Hsiao-Lee, you are denied it in your childhood and adolescence to perhaps never be able to find it then as an adult. Girl is all about the essential bleakness of life. Raw, rough and protracted, it’s a tough watch.