![]() ![]() And so, while she comes of age in this borderline paradisiacal environment of verdant fields and lush, dripping foliage, she also learns that as much as the women must cooperate in a sort of pliant, companionable domesticity, they are also in biological and sexual competition with one another - a fact thrown into high relief by the arrival of another equally young wife for Son, whom he rejects. Innocent as she is, May quickly perceives the wifely pecking order, and when she gets pregnant, innately understands that giving Hung a boy will secure her in his favor. It’s hard to tell quite where the fluttering desire of May’s sexual awakening will alight, but it has little to do with her husband - much like “The Third Wife” generally, which is content to sideline the menfolk while constantly nudging our attention onto the women. And there’s the sexually frank second wife Xuan (Mai Thu Huong), who, May discovers to her shock and confused arousal, is having a clandestine affair with Son (Nguyen Thanh Tam), Hung’s adult son with first wife Ha. ![]() There’s the watchful, elegant Ha played by the stunning Tran Nu Yen Khe (wife of artistic advisor Tran Anh Hung, whose “Scent of the Green Papaya” is one of the touchpoints here). More pertinent to May’s bright, curious attitude than the fertility ritual whereby her husband Hung (Le Vu Long) slurps a raw egg yolk from her navel and then thrusts painfully on top of her for a few minutes, more even than the display of the bloodied sheets the next day, are the quotidian rhythms of life on the isolated complex that will comprise her entire universe: playing with the younger kids, carrying dishes, fetching water and caring for her aged father-in-law.Īnd most important of all, there is her relationship with Hung’s two other wives. May is quickly inducted into her wifely duties, but Mayfair’s screenplay, honed but not overworked during its long passage through a host of workshops including Spike Lee’s Production Fund and NYU’s Purple List, is careful not to overstate the drama of her wedding night. This scene, like much of the rest of this impressionistic, unhurried story, plays without dialogue: a great deal of the emotional communication of the film is carried in glances and glimpses, in the softly plangent strings of Ton That An’s spare, elegant score, and the pattering, scuffing and quick, short breaths of Eduoard Morin’s sound design. May, young as a droplet clinging to a leaf, arrives to her new life by ceremonial canoe with her new family, including her landowner husband’s two other wives, arrayed before her in an intimidating tableau. ![]() Winner of prizes at both the San Sebastian and Toronto festivals, this is the rare debut that derives its freshness not from inexperience but from a balance between compassion and restraint that most filmmakers take decades to achieve. Though it’s almost painterly, in the pellucid watercolor palette of DP Chananun Chotrungroj’s glistening bamboo-green, aloe-scented imagery, and authentic to its period setting down to the quietest silken detail, by focusing with unwavering empathy on the interior life of teenage bride May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), the remarkable “ The Third Wife” feels newborn and ineffably modern. Gently dipping us into the long ago and far away past, Ash Mayfair’s directorial debut brings an intimate immediacy to the re-creation of rural Vietnam in the late 19th century. ![]()
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