How far will you go for love? That’s the question posed to the characters of the new film Skin of Youth.
Set in Saigon, Skin of Youth centers on Nam and his transgender love, San. They are embroiled in a torrid romance, and both make a living with their bodies: Nam is a scrappy boxer, San is a bejeweled dancer in a drag cabaret show. San dreams of a sex change and scopes out the men who frequent her club. One, Mr. Vuong, offers to finance her operation (and throw in enough for a vacation besides), in exchange for, well, whatever the rich guy wants. Nam is crushed by the fact that he can’t help but love himself. He marries San in a fanciful ceremony. “Grandma,” he exclaims, “I have a wife!”
Nam’s grandma provides traditionalism: all she wants from Nam’s marriage is grandbabies, something San can’t biologically provide her. While San does Mr. Vuong’s bidding, Nam takes up with a prostitute, intending to make her pregnant. Mimi is barely an adult herself, and when San sees her protruding belly, she resents her, then takes her in and establishes a unique family.
Mr. Vuong has many uses for San. He is a sadist and abuses her. Which propels Nam: he’ll finance her surgery himself by abandoning “legitimate” boxing—where he is headstrong and resents rules—and getting into the bone-crushing “dog cage” circuit, where the stakes are higher, and he’s beaten to a pulp nightly.
If the subject is tawdry, the production is anything but. Writer/director Ash Mayfair immerses us in Nam and San’s lurid world, all neon and sweaty shadows. With elegant staging and jackrabbit editing, she crosscuts between Nam’s bloody carnage and San’s glitzy performances. For the most part, Skin of Youth is suspenseful, solid filmmaking. Ms. Mayfair spares us nothing, and the world she depicts is complex. The fights are blistering, while some of the most effective scenes simply show the characters moving around their humdrum life of Saigon poverty. Ms. Mayfair has a good eye for the telling detail and endears us to her characters within minutes. The sex scenes are explicit but essential to the scenario.
The performances are all excellent. Trân Quân plays San with a doe-faced radiance, by turns seductive and tragic. She is heartbreaking as she yearns for and plans her surgery. Nam (a wide-eyed and rooster-haired Võ Diên Gia Huy) scoots through crowded alleys and markets on his motorcycle, barely avoiding police. Phan Thi Kim Ngân plays Mimi with an endearing childlike innocence. And Hajime Onoue is properly sinister as Mr. Vuong.
On the downside: perky pop music takes the sting out of some hard-hitting scenes (was that a decision of its Western distributors? If so, it’s misguided). As the story unfolds, and we wonder how Nam, San, and Mimi’s fates will resolve, we are plunged into a courtroom drama. It’s a narrative copout. The climax is generic when it should be as powerful as all that comes before.
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Skin of Youth. Directed by Ash Mayfair. 2026. Vietnamese with English subtitles. Runtime 122 minutes.