(Ed. Note: This was orginally published at Image Facts.)
Tae-suk’s residential philosophy is one especially poignant in an age where status and living space are becoming more closely linked than ever. The comic Steven Wright once said, “I have a hobby. I have the world’s largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world.” Tae-suk could say the same thing about where he lives. He simply roams about by day, systematically placing leaflets on all the doorknobs in a neighborhood. Later he returns, and logically figuring that a leaflet still in place signals a currently unoccupied house, he simply takes up residence until the next morning.
While in these other people’s homes he just potters about. He does the laundry and fixes little things that are broken. He is just a generally helpful unwelcome guest. This quiet routine is broken when he discovers that the house he has currently chosen is also occupied by Sun-Hwa, the abused significant other of the home’s affluent owner. She stalks him for a while, a curious spectator to his domestic rituals, before revealing herself and eventually skipping off in tow to the next vacant home. Their paradisiacal nomadic fantasy unfolds, in complete silence they enjoy a conceptual Eden in other people’s places (there isn’t a word of dialogue between them until three little words at the end of the film). In their downtime, Tae-suk practices his golf stroke while Sun Hwa tries to stand in his way, and director Kim Ki Duk has plenty of time to ply his trade in ironic gestures and thoughtful angles. All is fine and dandy until they discover a dead body in a small flat, and the gig is up. At this point the gentle silence cultivated by Kim between Tae-suk and Sun-hwa is broken up by angry policemen, prison guards, and a jealous boyfriend.
The second act of the film then takes an odd turn. Tae-suk spends time perfecting his phantom talents in prison until he is released and returns to find Sun-hwa, taking some particularly comic revenge on her browbeating boyfriend. This all makes for some great camerawork, certainly the strength of the piece, but in the long run turns out to be an odd change of course. The prison sequences in particular seem clunky set next to the seamless ease of the rest of the film. This change in focus from Tae-suk as a provocative pioneer of new living spaces to Tae-suk as sneaky lover undercuts the interesting commentary on the accepted homogeneity of modern living made earlier in the film. Tae-suk was far more interesting as a modern day hunter and gatherer. Kim Ki Duk would have been better off letting us see more of Sun-hwa seeking solace during her seperation from Tae-suk, as the brief glimpses we have of her during this time are memorable. All in all, 3 Iron may be more closely linked to his previous effortSpring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (>>) than it seems at first glance. Both films expose patterns of living, and even the actual physical form in which this takes place, as linked our convictions about the nature of self and society.
The closing image of 3 Iron is as charming and metonymical as the puzzling final sequence in Lost in Translation. It is as if together, this odd couple amounts to much less than they were by themselves. Tae-suk’s desire to be invisible, a weightless scavenger of the absence of others, is only made possible in the presence of this more grounding romance.
Here is a great interview with Kim in which he makes the comment: “My concept of semi-abstract movie making is about doing more then just presenting reality. To the world as we see it, I try to add our thoughts and feelings.” I would love to hear him and Claire Denis have a conversation on this point.