“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