3-Iron, the new film from South Korean writer-director Kim Ki-duk, begins in a wealthy suburb of Seoul, and the first thing that impressed me in the film's early shots is how much Seoul and Seattle have in common visually. The distant mountain ranges; the pale, color-drained sky; and the steep, hilly streets up which the film's sweetly puckish hero rides his motorbike (all strikingly photographed by Jang Seung-beck) create a vivid, oddly familiar sense of place.
Clad in a black leather vest, a young man in his early 20s rides from house to house, placing a flyer for ramen noodles on every door. Gradually, we learn his routine: he returns days later to see which houses still have the flyers attached. Assuming the occupants are away, he casually breaks in and makes himself at home.
Kim never tackles the question of whether Tae-suk (played by Jae Hee) is homeless; both the filmmaker and the actor approach the character as a whimsical loner, a lighter-than-air presence who appears content to hand-wash his absentee hosts' laundry on a scrub-board. Tae-suk leans into the frames of family pictures on display in strangers' houses, snapping a digital photo of himself with them, and his smile as he imposes his image over theirs seems to suggest a great joy of belonging.
Jae Hee as Tae-suk in 3-Iron (Photo: Woo Jong-il, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
One house Tae-suk enters isn't empty. A battered wife, her face bruised and swollen, remains inside, unbeknownst to him. And the film's tone shifts here from sly satire to a kind of mystery. The woman, Sun-hwa (played by Lee Seung-yeon) silently stays a few steps behind her intruder, watching as he goes about his chores; she observes him as a ghost might shadow the living.
The movie, it seems fair to announce at this point, is thrillingly good. In the male lead, Jae Hee has delicately expressive brown eyes, a baby face, and the soul of an innocent. It's a performance so graceful that you nearly forget it's a silent one. Down and out, and on the lam, the hero and the heroine communicate wordlessly — part of the tension that Kim sustains is whether the two will ever speak, and if they do, will anything they say match the eloquence of their pantomimed empathy?
The story takes place in the present, yet it has the air of a Depression-era Hollywood fable, both in the tone and in the resourcefulness of the characters, who move from one easily collapsible situation to the next. I was also reminded of the musical Pennies from Heaven, even though no one sings. That movie shares with 3-Iron sharp disparities between light fantasy and dark reality. Kim punctuates his film with bursts of violence that pull you out of the romantic whimsy, then, amazingly, he restores the playful scampish qualities of the original mood.
Perhaps the real subject of 3-Iron, a film in which golf balls occasionally play a prominent (and bone crunching) part, is about shifts in tone and how skillfully Kim handles them. Even a sequence at a police station, which might otherwise signal grim tidings, resolves as ethereally as a feather floating across a room. – NPT
3-Iron will have its local premiere during the opening weekend of the Seattle international film festival. It screens twice at the Neptune Theatre in the U-District: on Saturday, May 21 at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, May 22 at 4:15 p.m. If you miss it then, by all means catch the film when it opens for a regular run starting May 27 at the Harvard Exit in Capitol Hill.
Movies into Film
©2006, N.P. Thompson
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com