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February 1st, 2006 by Cory Mailliard (Permalink)
Director: Kim Ki-duk Year: 2004 Add Comments |
I came to 3-Iron blindly with little experience of Korean cinema, or the work of Kim Ki-duk. I walked away bruised and broken—thrown around by a master in complete control of his world. If 3-Iron is not Ki-duk’s best, I cannot think of a better place to start. After one film, I’m already feverishly tracking down the rest of his catalogue. Screen it with Oldboy, and you have a hammer-subtle reminder that if you’re not keeping your eye on Korean cinema, you might not have your finger on the pulse of modern film.
3-Iron follows Jae Hee, a squatter motorcycling around the city, looking for homes to stay in while the occupants are away. He steals nothing, breaks nothing—in fact, he cleans, does laundry, fixes appliances, and leaves barely a sign that he was there. He takes photos of himself standing in front of family portraits. Indeed, for a short time, he is a member of the family. Slowly, we begin to understand his act: it is simultaneously an act of deep connection and intense isolation. For a moment, he is as close as a son, but he is, effectively, a ghost.
Eventually, he is discovered by the wife (Lee Seung-yeon) of an abusive businessman—herself nearly a spirit, but in her own home. She sits—obviously damaged both physically and mentally—and watches silently while Hee moves throughout her home, fixing her scale, using her husband’s golf clubs. Her face is beautiful and bruised. Her purple, swollen lip makes her frown unbearable. Wordlessly, they fall in love. After a confrontation with her husband, Hee leaves and Seung-yeon follows. They will not speak for the entire film.
In lesser hands, 3-Iron would be merely a film about two people removing themselves from society. However, it is with slowly emerging wonder that we begin to understand the real connections that our protagonist and his companion make. Not only with each other, but also with the people whose lives they briefly inhabit. Midway through the film, Hee sees a photograph of Seung-yeon in the home of a professional photographer. It is the only item he ever steals. How wrong, it must seem to him, to hang another’s photograph for decoration only. Later, Seung-yeon returns to a home they once stayed in—this time while the owners are there—to sleep on the couch. They let her. Kim Ki-duk represents the situation so carefully that later, when our squatters (guilty of breaking and entering at the least) are confronted violently for their intimate transgression, it feels like betrayal on the part of the homeowners.
Deep within all of this is a vein of distrust concerning technology, most notably represented by Hee’s (and later Seung-yeon’s) aversion do doing laundry with a washing machine. Instead, they choose to sit in the bathroom and use a washboard. Ki-duk seems to reject convenience as a path to isolation while commenting that it is not the act that is noble, but the work that goes into it. Like so much of the film, the meaning is ineffable. It makes sense within its own internal logic, and deep within your firing synapses, but it’s also a blank canvas to be projected upon.
The strength of 3-Iron comes from the deft balance of loneliness and connection, and Ki-duk’s savant-like understanding of the tiny movements—emotional and physical—that bond people together. The decision of a character late in the film to disappear completely, which could easily have been read as an act of extreme isolation, is suddenly one of the most original and romantic gestures ever committed to film. The balance between seeming polar opposites in 3-Iron creates complexity out of stark minimalism. We are comfortable with our surrounding from the beginning: the film has all the trappings and movements of a typical romance genre piece, making it perfect for an audience that would not touch a foreign film without a hazmat suit. The simplicity belies deep existential implications, and while you may be tempted to believe you know where the story is headed, 3-Iron is delightfully surprising at every turn.
3-Iron is the best kind of cinema in the same way it is the best kind of waking dream: familiar, but utterly and completely fabricated, each image loaded with ideas difficult to articulate. It is amazingly turbulent beneath its placid surface, bubbling with satire and emotion and begging to be thought about and discussed. And most amazing, Kim Ki-duk does it all with hardly a word.
Perhaps most surprising is that while Kim Ki-duk has an obvious mastery over the medium, he has no formal training in film. He served in the military before moving to France where he spent two years as a painter. Later, he discovered cinema and released his first film, Crocodile, in 1996. Since then, Ki-duk has released twelve films in ten years, including last year’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, which garnered nearly universal acclaim.
Ki-duk has been described as a provocateur first and poet second. Many of his earlier films were concerned with violence, prostitution, and murder. Ki-duk once said that the starting point for most of his work was hatred. However, with 3-Iron, the poetry has come to the fore, and while violence lurks beneath the surface (the titular 3-iron, which is owned by the abusive husband, becomes a symbol of violence and revenge), the film is nothing if not mannered. Throughout, Ki-duk keeps the image simple—in some cases downright banal—only to sucker punch the audience with sudden affecting images created with a painter’s eye for deep emotion in static frames.
If the film has any fault, it is that the villains are caricatures hardly sketched beyond their ugliness. Still, as reservations go, it’s quibbling. Despite the love triangle hinted at in the title, 3-Iron is a film about two people, their silent bond, and the transcendence that they achieve by being alone together—even if they are not, in fact, alone.
Kim Ki-duk completed another film in 2005. Called The Bow, early word has placed it in the same company as 3-Iron and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (tonally speaking). When it comes to my small corner of the world, I will be waiting with open arms. And hopefully, by then, I will have consumed the remainder of his work.
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February 15th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I caught this last night thanks to this Showcase, a fascinating enjoyable film.