Direction: Ash Mayfield
Country: Vietnam
The Third Wife is meek and melancholic, yet informative. The modest period drama tells the story of May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), a 14-year-old who inherently accepts her fate of becoming the third wife of a wealthy, polygamist landowner (Le Vu Long) in the late 19th-century Vietnam. Sharing the same will of the other wives, May intends to give birth to a male baby since it would allow her to grow in status within the closed community.
For good or for bad, she develops a strange attraction to Xuan (Mai Thu Huong Maya), the second wife, whose secret she shares and whose freedom she deeply admires.
The film, loosely based on the life of director Ash Mayfield’s great-grandmother, was keenly filmed, capturing idyllic landscapes immersed in gracious hues. These imagery provides a contrasting effect when compared to the emotional disquietness that the characters experience, most of the times, in silence.
Despite clear, the ideas are never vehemently expressed, with Mayfield preferring a subtle flow that may attract some viewers and keep others aside. The approach is simplistic in nature, oozing delicacy even in the toughest moments. Yet, although fumbling from time to time, this is a respectable first work from Mayfield, who didn’t thrill me with her methods of bringing out emotion and intimacy, but revealed a huge capacity to embrace aesthetic filmmaking.
