Critics reviews

Mayfair’s choice to focus on normal, everyday events rather than the viscerally terrible ones is particularly devastating because it emphasizes how May can not imagine a better life she could escape to.

Some viewers may want delicacy in a period film about women navigating a world in which they’ve been pitted against one another. But maybe, Mayfair suggests, we need the blunt reminder: The issues that women were confronting in the Vietnam of the 1800s — a world in which they’re considered property more than people — aren’t all that different from today.

But what The Third Wife lacks is a cohesive, governing sensibility; it has a committee-approved feel that renders individual choices more or less serviceable, but makes the entire affair feel sanded down... Though it’s a film built on multiple, emancipatory, anti-patriarchal gestures, The Third Wife gives the impression of a director simply going through the calculated motions.

“The Third Wife” presents a tableau of injustice — a male-dominated hierarchy that directly oppresses women and brings collateral misery to some men as well — from a perspective that feels both compassionate and detached. It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.

What’s perhaps most striking about The Third Wife is Mayfair’s measured approach, rare for a debut and a young filmmaker. Fleshy and sensual, May’s sexual awakening never veers into provocation so much as it glides natural, titillating facts of life into her purview.

The tight bonds of wifehood and motherhood grasp them all, and yet Ash Mayfair’s final images are those of defiance. The lingering shot at the film’s end defines The Third Wife as a picturesque exploration of not only women’s subjugation but their desperate attempts at resistance.

Although this is a film that puts the women's predicament at its heart - with each acting both as support group and competitor to the others, a feeling heightened after May falls pregnant - Mayfair shows sympathy for the men as well, who despite more ostensible power are almost as cocooned into the cultural system as their female counterparts.

Mayfair's picture feels like the work of a seasoned veteran rather than a newcomer, but this isn't necessarily a compliment. It's sensitively poetic and tremulously delicate to a fault, with every beat seemingly accompanied and underlined by an intrusive score from Ton That An which is heavily freighted with plangent strings and mournful piano notes.

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... 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.

The Third Wife holds our unbroken concentration for its duration, its elegiac reverence capturing our attention with its contextually heavy pans and gorgeous frames deftly telling us where to look through sheer compositional perfection.

It is commendable that Mayfair deftly enables May and her sister-wives to explore their own agencies and sexualities without ever using their suffering as window dressing to illustrate the film’s gritty authenticity.

All [the] elements are woven into a finely detailed and quietly devastating tapestry where rare moments of genuine intimacy are intensely experienced. If this focus on fleeting pleasures occasionally risks exoticizing the subject, Mayfair’s sensory approach to illustrating an almost unbearable absence of female fulfillment achieves a powerful universal resonance.