How can this beautifully shot, impressively crafted take on the subjugation of women in late 19th century Vietnam not be everyone's cup of tea? Certainly the film's subject matter personally meant quite a bit to debut director Ash Mayfair, who based the narrative on the experiences of her great-grandmother.
Mayfair chronicles the interior and exterior life of a 14 year old bride, May (played by 12 year old Nguyen Phoung Tra My), who becomes the third wife of a wealthy landowner, Hung May soon comes to realize that she's lower in the pecking order in relation to her predecessors: Wife #1 Ha (Tran Nu Yen Khe) and Wife #2 Xuan (Mai Thu Huong).
May soon learns that her primary objective is to produce a male child and despite enduring the unpleasant experience of losing her virginity with "Master" Hung, she remains devoted to the idea that perpetuating the Hung male line is not necessarily a bad thing.
Mayfair's plot involves various machinations among the wives including Xuan's clandestine affair with Son, Hung's adult son with first wife Ha, as well as some lesbian yearnings on May's part toward the much more experienced Xuan. There's also subplot involving Son who rejects another of his father's hand-picked brides, Lien.
Mayfair does well in depicting the constricted lives of the women and how they must cope within a system that's stacked against them. You might guess that things turn out rather tragically for May, after she gives birth to a daughter.
While normally my movie-going tastes rarely extend to such downbeat tales, Mayfair manages to highlight the quiet dignity of her protagonist in a way that partly draws you in. Nonetheless, overall there is something about the film that left me cold. It wasn't so much the film's glacial pacing but the inability of Mayfair to flesh out any of her antagonists. Simply put the men are ciphers who display no idiosyncrasies which would mark them as multi-dimensional human beings.
Without the presence of the aforementioned "fleshed-out" antagonists, The Third Wife feels more like an exercise in agitprop-content to echo the theme of women's subjugation ad infinitum. We get the whole idea early on that this is going to be a rather obvious critique of patriarchal culture. With a crucial missing "part," The Third Wife indeed may prove to be not everyone's cup of tea. Nonetheless, Mayfair still has proven to be a force to be reckoned with as she moves forward in her career as a talented and dedicated auteur.
Mayfair chronicles the interior and exterior life of a 14 year old bride, May (played by 12 year old Nguyen Phoung Tra My), who becomes the third wife of a wealthy landowner, Hung May soon comes to realize that she's lower in the pecking order in relation to her predecessors: Wife #1 Ha (Tran Nu Yen Khe) and Wife #2 Xuan (Mai Thu Huong).
May soon learns that her primary objective is to produce a male child and despite enduring the unpleasant experience of losing her virginity with "Master" Hung, she remains devoted to the idea that perpetuating the Hung male line is not necessarily a bad thing.
Mayfair's plot involves various machinations among the wives including Xuan's clandestine affair with Son, Hung's adult son with first wife Ha, as well as some lesbian yearnings on May's part toward the much more experienced Xuan. There's also subplot involving Son who rejects another of his father's hand-picked brides, Lien.
Mayfair does well in depicting the constricted lives of the women and how they must cope within a system that's stacked against them. You might guess that things turn out rather tragically for May, after she gives birth to a daughter.
While normally my movie-going tastes rarely extend to such downbeat tales, Mayfair manages to highlight the quiet dignity of her protagonist in a way that partly draws you in. Nonetheless, overall there is something about the film that left me cold. It wasn't so much the film's glacial pacing but the inability of Mayfair to flesh out any of her antagonists. Simply put the men are ciphers who display no idiosyncrasies which would mark them as multi-dimensional human beings.
Without the presence of the aforementioned "fleshed-out" antagonists, The Third Wife feels more like an exercise in agitprop-content to echo the theme of women's subjugation ad infinitum. We get the whole idea early on that this is going to be a rather obvious critique of patriarchal culture. With a crucial missing "part," The Third Wife indeed may prove to be not everyone's cup of tea. Nonetheless, Mayfair still has proven to be a force to be reckoned with as she moves forward in her career as a talented and dedicated auteur.