Coming Soon
3-IRON
2004
Director
Kim Ki-duk
Starring
Lee Seung-yeon
Jae Hee
Kwon Hyuk-ho
Choi Jeong-ho
Runtime
88 minutes
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I don’t think words make everything understandable.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee), a motorcycle vagabond petty criminal, and early adopter of selfies with a deadly powerful golf swing, navigates the city like a helpful poltergeist– staying in temporarily vacant homes until their owners return from vacation to new light bulbs and rearranged furniture. When he trespasses on the residence of Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), an abused housewife and former model with a penchant for vengeance and a need for affection, it is love at first break-in. After a golf-off with her POS husband, Sun-hwa is whisked away into the shadowy life of Tae-suk.
The lovers haunt one empty apartment after another followed by Sun-hwa’s persistent ex-husband and an ever-growing cast of grumbling homeowners. But 3-IRON is not a typical love story and results in neither a wedding or a funeral, but the sort of romantic entanglement that transcends all earthly reason and cannot be expressed in the measly verbiage of “I love you” (or sarranghae, for that matter).
Béla Balázs, a noted influence on writer of 3-IRON, Hye Seung Chung, wrote of the silent soliloquy enacted on the screen by the human face in close-up: “In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously.” This Balázsian notion comes to fruition in the inaction of love beyond language in 3-IRON visualized by haunting. Caring becomes a mutual persistence beyond the veil. Vulnerability becomes a supernatural ability that physicists throw their arms up in despair, incapable of understanding. The tale of Tae-suk and Sun-hwa achieves the level of a pure cinematic experience not unlike returning to the silent movie houses of the first decade of cinema.
In a series about squatting, Kim Ki-duk’s film is the missing piece of the puzzle– finding harmony in disrupting privatized space by incorporating the aesthetic of haunting removed from the horror genre. Some human connections cannot be confined to a singular house in time, they must roam from empty room to empty room.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee), a motorcycle vagabond petty criminal, and early adopter of selfies with a deadly powerful golf swing, navigates the city like a helpful poltergeist– staying in temporarily vacant homes until their owners return from vacation to new light bulbs and rearranged furniture. When he trespasses on the residence of Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), an abused housewife and former model with a penchant for vengeance and a need for affection, it is love at first break-in. After a golf-off with her POS husband, Sun-hwa is whisked away into the shadowy life of Tae-suk.
The lovers haunt one empty apartment after another followed by Sun-hwa’s persistent ex-husband and an ever-growing cast of grumbling homeowners. But 3-IRON is not a typical love story and results in neither a wedding or a funeral, but the sort of romantic entanglement that transcends all earthly reason and cannot be expressed in the measly verbiage of “I love you” (or sarranghae, for that matter).
Béla Balázs, a noted influence on writer of 3-IRON, Hye Seung Chung, wrote of the silent soliloquy enacted on the screen by the human face in close-up: “In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously.” This Balázsian notion comes to fruition in the inaction of love beyond language in 3-IRON visualized by haunting. Caring becomes a mutual persistence beyond the veil. Vulnerability becomes a supernatural ability that physicists throw their arms up in despair, incapable of understanding. The tale of Tae-suk and Sun-hwa achieves the level of a pure cinematic experience not unlike returning to the silent movie houses of the first decade of cinema.
In a series about squatting, Kim Ki-duk’s film is the missing piece of the puzzle– finding harmony in disrupting privatized space by incorporating the aesthetic of haunting removed from the horror genre. Some human connections cannot be confined to a singular house in time, they must roam from empty room to empty room.