Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A Tale of Love follows the quest of a woman in love with Love. Voyeurism runs through the history of narrative and is here one of the threads that structure the film. Playing with the fiction of love in love stories, the film invites a different experience of cinema with non-naturalistic acting and layered interaction of performed reality, memory and imagination.

The film depicts interconnected lives of various characters in South Vietnam in and after the war: a young girl (Mai) who lost her father (Hau)- a Viet Cong cadre; a woman (Nam) whose deceased husband is a South Vietnamese soldier has feelings for Hau and is trying to protect his daughter; a depressive man (Luong) who used to fight with Nam's husband has strong resentment towards his old army.

A law student and a navy officer fosters a beautiful love, but soon get separated by war.

The 19th-century tragedy by Alexandre Dumas fils reimagined in the Saigon's nightclub scene of late 1990s, where a young man falls helplessly in love with the famed dancer Y Lan.