This lyrical, bitter 1987 Vietnamese feature, directed with style and distinction by Dang Nhat Minh, focuses on two womena prostitute working on a boat on the Perfumed River in central Vietnam during the war who winds up sheltering and having an affair with a wounded Vietcong leader, and a reporter hearing her tell her story in the present. A blistering attack on both censorship and the changes in Vietnamese society since the war, it offers a provocative juxtaposition of past and present, even if it reaches for a rather outlandish plot coincidence in doing so. (JR)