“3-Iron” Directed by Kim Ki-Duk Sony
Pictures Classics
Kim Ki-Duk is touted by many as one of world cinema’s
bright new talents ““ he burned a trail across today’s
film festival circuit like General Sherman through Georgia ““
but it’s no stretch to say he would have been right at home
back in the silent era. Kim’s latest film,
“3-Iron” (which took home four awards from the Venice
Film Festival), follows a protagonist whom the audience never hears
a word from ““ and, for certain key stretches, doesn’t
even see. That man is Tae-Suk (Jae Hee, an unknown in his native
Korea), who spends his days in Seoul slapping restaurant menus onto
people’s doors, only to return later and break into the empty
residences. He’s no thief; instead, he briefly inhabits each
home, making sure to keep the place up: watering the plants,
hand-washing the laundry, fixing a broken appliance here and there.
It’s a peculiarity in the same spirit of a Wong Kar-Wai
character or two ““ a director who, though vastly different in
style, has also explored the theme of physical and spiritual
displacement in urban Asia. And, as with many Wong films,
there’s an unconventional love story lurking at the heart of
“3-Iron.” Soon enough, Tae-Suk winds up unknowingly
entering a home occupied by the battered wife Sun-Hwa (Lee
Seong-Yeon). After some heroics involving his rather impressive
golf swing, Tae-Suk manages to pry the woman, a 3-iron and some
golf balls from her abusive husband’s grasp, and the two form
an odd bond as nomadic accomplices. They also manage to fall in
love without uttering a word to each other, together sharing the
daunting isolation each faces in one of the most densely packed
cities in the world. These scenes, filled like the rest of the film
with Kim’s trademark mix of humor, tenderness and abrupt
violence, begin to fall into a unique rhythm, at which point Kim
characteristically twists the narrative on its head. Kim also
possesses a precise, painterly eye for images ““ no surprise,
considering his previous career was selling paintings on the
streets of France ““ and here achieves a slightly surreal
sense of both immediacy and distance in the film’s
cinematography. He compounds this effect with the sparseness of
dialogue and the narrative to invite questions about the line
between dreams and reality, an undercurrent which becomes more
apparent as the story unfolds. “3-Iron” was reportedly
written in a month, filmed in 16 days and edited in 10. Kim is
notoriously prolific; this is his eighth film in five years, with
another on the way, and “3-Iron” is the assured work of
a filmmaker too busy to fool around, bringing to mind the swift
confidence of the New German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in
the ’70s. Or, perhaps more fittingly, the film could be said
to echo Fassbinder’s predecessors, expressionists such as FW
Murnau and Fritz Lang, masters of the silent form. -Alfred
Lee