Social realism and soap opera generally have more in common than the po-faced occupiers of your local arthouse would like you to believe. Every time Sean Baker or the Dardennes find a new and exciting way to kick their characters when they’re down, you’re only a few budget cuts and some cobbles away from Coronation Street. This is an acknowledgement that lies at the heart of many a great melodrama, an awareness that this is a line to be rode, a meeting of honesty and grandeur. It’s a tightrope act that Ash Mayfair’s third feature Skin of Youth manages, at least for a good chunk of its runtime.
Set in ’90s Vietnam, the film follows lovers San (Trân Quân) and Nam (Võ Diên Gia Huy) as they attempt to eke out an existence in a city hurtling toward change. San is a cabaret performer and sex worker, Nam is a prizefighter, and they each dutifully power through nocturnal Saigon in an attempt to afford the final round of San’s transitioning surgeries. It’s a chance afforded when mysterious businessman Mr. Vuong (Hajime Inoue) becomes entranced by San and offers to pay for it, provided she spends enough nights with him. This sets in motion a series of resentments and acts of violence that spin their lives, and indeed the film out of control.
Skin of Youth is a far more straightforward film than Mayfair’s debut, the beguiling The Third Wife, but her and DP Chananun Chotrungroj still have a brilliant photographic eye, the film always looking impeccable as it works within a more conventional narrative framework. It’s this eye for beauty that initially elevates the film beyond a more straightforwardly despondent tale of horrible events besetting marginalized people trying to do better for themselves. And this isn’t delivered only via its visual design — the whole film bounces through its early stages with real verve, buoyed by the two leads’ chemistry, and balancing well the respective tensions between their honest and performed selves. All that, and the film has a good sense when to drop realism and go big, like the Blofeld-like imagery of Mr. Vuong or the stylized performance sequences. This triangulation of smart decisions and keen aesthetic helps Skin of Youth ride the line of melodrama well, and as San increasingly becomes the film’s center, it begins to establish the feeling of one of the mid-’60s downbeat Cardinale vehicles, or even a bit of pre-code Norma Shearer.
The film moves impressively for its opening hour, but as the pair begin to go from being intertwined to parallel, it starts to lose its footing a touch, tumbling headlong into full soapiness. The second act unceremoniously and conspicuously clunks into gear, and things begin to feel like they are going slowly uphill where once they bounced, seeming to alight on any and every plot point possible until it wheezily collapses to a finish. That’s by no means to say Skin of Youth slips into the territory of being a bad film, but it does become increasingly messy, with the characters coming to seem more sloppily assembled and the film falling out of contact with its own established sense of logic.
Still, Skin of Youth proves a difficult film to take a hard line against, especially when you compare it to similar contemporary films — for instance, The Garden of Earthly Delights, another exploration of sex work in Southeast Asia that has been doing the festival rounds. Mayfair’s film merifully possesses none of that film’s adolescent cruelty, and instead carries a clear love for its characters and the pains they endure earnestly and honestly. If Skin of Youth can’t quite keep them in a satisfying shape, it at least reaffirms Mayfair as a voice to follow, hopefully to greatness — teased but as yet unrealized in her first three features — in a future project.
DIRECTOR: Ash Mayfair; CAST: Tran Quan, Võ Điền Gia Huy, Hajime Inoue, Phạm Thị Kim Ngân, Lê Công Hoàng; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING: June 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
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