In the Name of Love

Fish-farmer Khanh is overjoyed when his wife Lua gets pregnant and gives birth to a son; he’d been told his sperm-count was too low. But Lua has resorted to desperate measures to get pregnant: she secretly asked fellow villager Linh to impregnate her. Linh is an embittered man whose own family has left him, and he grows intensely jealous of Khanh and Lua’s happiness. Unable to control himself, he suddenly demands possession of "his" son…

Luu Huynh’s film, beautifully shot in ’Scope, moves from rural naturalism to powerhouse melodrama as murderous passions are unleashed. The issues it addresses are clearly not unfamiliar to Western audiences, but seeing them in a Vietnamese context brings them to life in fresh and unexpected ways. This process is very much enhanced by Luu’s decision to film on location in a real floating village, and to anchor the drama in authentic details of the way of life in La Nga. His lead actors are professionals (all with flourishing careers in TV), but are entirely credible as fisher-folk. Luu himself was trained in Pasadena (he was a “boat person” refugee from Vietnam in the 1970s), which perhaps explains the sophistication of his editing: the narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time in ways that intensify the drama and vividly foreground the moral questions.

— Tony Rayns