New Releases

Puttered Out
By James Crawford

3-Iron (take 1) read take 2
Dir. Kim Ki-duk, South Korea,
Sony Pictures Classics

Will the real Kim Ki-duk please stand up? For those who used Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring as an occasion to retroactively discover his oeuvre, as I did recently, the response likely ranges between bewilderment and an outright sense of betrayal. Spring’s quiet grace and directness of expression seemingly heralded the arrival of a director with humanism and powers of observation to rival that of countryman Hong Sang-soo. Arrival is perhaps the wrong word for Kim. At age 44 and with an acclaimed resume dating back to 1996, he is neither a young nor an up-and-coming auteur; nonetheless, Spring was certainly Kim’s North American calling card. Its ability to infuse rote subjects—coming of age, sexual awakening, the passage of time, human fallibility and forgiveness, and clashes between modern/urban and traditional/rural ways of existence—with compassion and bursting humanism was nothing short of enthralling.

The problem is the rest of his films seem not to be informed by Spring’s lessons. Sensationalism replaces restraint in The Isle; in Bad Guy, and Crocodile, overt display substitutes oblique suggestion; and in all, blatant, extravagance supersedes quiet, dignified anguish. These and others barely function as narratives. They are more like collections of scenes loosely connected by time, place, action and character (Kim is nothing if not an observer of Aristotelian unities), working mainly as aggregates or anthologies of depredation and violence—sexual and otherwise—inflicted by the director on his characters. Kim is a director ex machina, and aside from Spring, nearly every gesture feels as though dictated from on high, rather than plausibly evolving out of character. Which is fine if you want to view his cinema as treatises on how cruel people can be to one another, or as testaments to the social trauma of living in modern South Korea, but unsatisfactory if you’re looking to be seduced by a story. So, a corollary for unearthing Kim Ki-duk’s back catalogue: falling for In the Mood for Love, tracking down the rest of Wong Kar-wai, and finding instead Days of Being Wild’s disarming elegy the agonizing emotional brutality of Park Chan-wook.

The comparison is particularly apt, because Kim’s latest, 3-Iron, borrows its conceit from Chungking Express. The film is again markedly different from everything that has preceded it, at times mirroring the deft sensitivity that makes Spring such a marvel and at others drawing on the cruelty that pervades every film prior to it—a catch-all for Kim’s varying sensibilities. A drifter, Tae-suk (Hee Sae), spends time breaking into and inhabiting people’s houses while they’re away on vacation. During his sojourns, which usually last a couple of nights, Tae-suk fixes himself meals with food from their fridges, reads their books, lounges in their bathtubs, and generally avails himself of their hospitality. He always repays their unwitting generosities by performing domestic chores: doing their laundry or fixing broken appliances before he moves on to another household. In Chungking, mainly due to Faye Wong’s impish magnetism, the gambit was played for whimsy and caprice. 3-Iron, the stakes are emotionally much higher, for while Faye sought to reach out the object of her affection in absentia, Tae-suk does it to find connection with someone—anyone. His break-and-entries are not motivated by financial need (nothing is ever stolen), but to abridge the fundamental loneliness that has rendered him mute.

Or is his unwillingness to communicate a side-effect of his untold and presumably horrific life experiences? Kim nearly always focuses on a prominent character that does not speak, either by trauma, choice, or congenital disease and their muteness invites speculation as to how the condition came about. Possessing nothing but the clothes on his back, a digital camera, a sleek (and no doubt expensive) motorcycle, and a set of lock-picks, Tae-suk is a paradoxical renunciatory figure, and reminds me of a September, 2004 Newsweek article in which B.J. Lee chronicled the legion of young, wealthy South Koreans who found their upward mobility stalled by President Roh Moo-hyun. Roh’s anti-business policies provoked a good deal of fear amongst the country’s wealthy set that livelihoods would soon be undermined. South Korea experienced a significant brain drain to North America as well as an equally damaging exodus of capital to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. By contrast, Tae-suk’s nomadic lifestyle is an inverted flight from society—an inward exodus that shuns traditional forms of social congress and refuses to play by the rules.

But Tae-suk still exhibits the need to connect, and he effects it in a curious way, one that doesn’t force him to deal with human behavior’s uglier sides. By taking pictures of himself against their hung portraits or works of art, Tae-suk is able to insinuate himself into other peoples’ lives and penetrate the hermetically sealed pockets of habitation (houses, apartments) into which humans have squirreled themselves away, and create for himself counter-narratives of domestic life. Functioning as a human archaeologist, Tae-suk extrapolates an image of these vacated families from the left-behind detritus of their lives—food in the fridge, unwashed clothes strewn about, books left on coffee tables. But there inevitably is a break between his romanticized projections and the actual house inhabitants. A congenial family photograph and the mother’s chirpy answering machine message give the impression of a congenial, happy family; in real life, once the intruder has long gone, the mother is revealed to be a shrew, the father an aloof patriarch, and the son a violent little brat.

For a time, it’s possible to deny the disconnect, but when Tae-suk breaks into a wealthy home and finds Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), he can’t keep up the fiction any longer, because she’s clearly a domestic abuse victim. So when her husband comes home, Tae-suk launches golf balls at him (with a little help from the 3-iron of the title), and as the husband lays there in agony, the unlikely couple hit the road, continuing the familiar pattern of breaking and entering, inhabiting and sharing, cleaning and fixing, with nary a word spoken between them. In complete silence, Jae and Lee plumb remarkable emotional depth and complexity, drawing meaning from minute facial gestures and the spatial orientation of their bodies. Jae’s performance—all the more extraordinary because 3-Iron is his feature debut—is virtually somnambulant, a stoic canvas of blank expression unaffected by the world around him. He functions as a pillar in which Lee’s character can find strength while reciprocally, she is able to induce fissures in his expressionless façade. Hunched over plates of steaming food, their backs curved in harmony, Jae and Lee form an insulated barrier against the outside world. As a model of symbiotic acting—of sweet, deft give-and-take between two actors that sublimates their collective work beyond anything they could achieve individually—these performances are unrivaled by anything else I’ve seen this year.

Regrettably, in the third act, everything starts to fall apart, devolving into the familiar terrain of excessive inflicted violence. Tae-suk is discovered while skulking around in one apartment, is arrested and thrown in jail for trespass and a trumped-up charge of kidnapping Sun-Hwa. What started as an affecting, simply stated tale about a man who extracts himself from a society he finds unpalatable deteriorates into a heavy-handed manifesto. The police, hell-bent on beating Tae-suk into submission, become the avatars for an excessively brutal state and our hero, still unspeaking, is the everyman forced to suffer at its hands. The course of beatings completely undermines the light-hearted game of cat-and-mouse Tae-suk uses to keep himself entertained in prison—attempting to keep himself hidden from sight in a ten-by-ten cell stripped of furniture, and completely mitigates the impact of the most beautiful moment—when Tae-suk slips away from sight altogether.

Kim Ki-duk is as unique as any director working today; like the most individual auteurs, he rigorously conforms to no other vision of the cinema but his own. As a friend mused recently, watching 3-Iron, as with the rest of his work, is like regressing to silent cinema, and I think she’s right. Kim depends so much on wordless communication and meaningful interplay of glances that recalls early Josef von Sternberg. But keeping Kim far away from the pantheon is his disobliging habit of taking flights of fancy and failing to stick the landing (that and beating the hell out of his characters for no discernible reason). Here, it’s metaphors stretched to the breaking point, not once but twice. The motivation for using the 3-iron? It is “the least used club [in golf]” he says, which therefore underscores his themes of loneliness and isolation. It’s a beautiful film, but for want of a little subtlety.

read Tom J. Carlisle's take on 3-iron