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- Verified Buyer
Who are we, and of what are we made? Flesh, spirit, both? Are we figments of another's imagination, or figures in a dream? If so, are we the dreamers or the dreamed? Can we transcend what we are and become something of our own making? Korean director KIM Ki-duk explores all of these questions in his film "3-Iron" (Korean title, "Empty House"), an evocative meditation on the nature of substance and transformation.Tae-suk, a young man of obvious means and (we will learn) a college education, has chosen to exist outside the society in which he lives, moving silently and with near invisibility on its extreme outer edges. Dressed in fine clothes and riding a new BMW motorcycle through the streets of Seoul, he cleverly deduces which houses are empty of their occupants and then moves in for the night. He enjoys the home owner's food, TV, bath, bed, and always photographs himself against a portrait of them, or with some beloved object of theirs. But this is only half of the deal he strikes with his unwitting hosts--he repays and thanks them by washing their clothes (by hand, with a washboard), tidying their houses, repairing their broken appliances. His level of skill at choosing and entering these homes testifies to the length of time he has been living like this, and clearly he intends to go on as he has, until the day he enters the house of a rich businessman. He spends his day in the usual manner, unaware that he has been observed all along by someone every bit as stealthy as himself. Sun-hwa, the silent, sorrowing wife of an abusive husband, watches him as he washes her clothes, practices his golf swing, fixes the bathroom scale (he weighs 65 kilos, she, 47), until he goes to bed. Then she makes her presence known. Startled and distressed, Tae-suk beats a hasty retreat, stopping only long enough to hear Sun-hwa's angry husband berating her over the telephone answering machine and her frustrated scream, her only reply to the furious man. After taking in her beaten face and exchanging long, meaningful looks, Tae-suk leaves, only to find himself compelled to return to the house. He finds Sun-hwa weeping in the bath, and rather than speak to her he goes to her closet and chooses a pale pink outfit to replace the black one she has been wearing all day, then to the CD player to put in a CD he has been carrying with him. The mournful, haunting voice of Natacha Atlas (singing in an unearthly-sounding Arabic) seems to call Sun-hwa to join Tae-suk in his world between the seen and unseen worlds, and she does so in perfect, yet silent, understanding. (Never once, for the entire length of the film, does Tae-suk speak, while Sun-hwa speaks only briefly, at the end of the film.) Sun-hwa's husband returns to encounter a wife whom he can no longer persuade or bully into intimacy with him, and a silently vengeful stranger who attacks him in a rather unorthodox manner with the 3-iron golf club of the title. The two leave, and so begin their transformative journey together.Like Terrence Mallick, Andrey Tarkovsky, the Polish brothers, and other great poets of cinema, KIM ki-duk tells his story almost entirely through inference, implying that language is not merely unnecessary, but even destructive. Like the above-mentioned directors, KIM creates characters who live in the margins, yet through them and their rejection of the things of the world--including language--all of life, especially the life of the spirit, gains force. In today's rackety world of cinema it is a daring thing to open one's film with 20 minutes of near absolute silence-- no music beyond a bit over the front titles--and virtually no dialogue. Most directors would have lost their nerve and scored the thing, but KIM trusts his audience to stay with him even as the silence deepens. Sun-hwa and Tae-suk go from home to home, and a ritual emerges: he puts on the Natacha Atlas CD, they eat, sleep, and, eventually, make love, though this is not the true consummative act of their relationship. In between new abodes, Tae-suk practices with the 3-Iron he's taken from Sun-hwa's husband. This is the one activity of which Sun-hwa disapproves and tries to stop. She seems to see it as evidence of some attachment, in Tae-suk, to the bourgeois world; it's the sort of thing her husband does, a rich man's hobby with no place in the life these two seek. A terrible accident only underscores its "wrongness" (perhaps the film's only moment of heavy-handedness). Eventually we will see that Tae-suk has no need of a physical 3-iron, and questions will arise: Is an invisible golf ball real, if people are fighting over it? Is an invisible 3-iron the proper weapon for an invisible man?The film boxes Seoul's compass, taking us from the wealthiest neighborhoods to the poorest, from the bourgeoisie to the avant-garde. In the apartment of the photographer who has, on a previous occasion, photographed Sun-hwa, she is confronted with her own idealized portrait on the wall, the symbol of her life as an object of beauty to be possessed by her wealthy husband (issues of ownership and possession are repeatedly explored in "3-Iron"). She dismantles this portrait, re-arranging it into an image that more reflects her image of herself at the moment and replaces it on the wall (keep your eyes on the evolution of this photograph throughout the film).The pair perform small acts of kindness (which are as invisible to those for whom they are performed as they themselves are), and one great act of tenderness, which brings them suddenly and terribly to the attention of others--in the fringe world they are occupying, it is dangerous to be seen. They end up in the custody of the police, Sun-hwa is handed over to her husband like a piece of luggage he's filed a claim about, and after a few misadventures while in custody, Tae-suk ends up in jail.In a world where the cult of materialism prevails, everything is for sale, including the integrity of the police, but they are repeatedly frustrated as Tae-suk refuses to be traumatized, or even mildly irked, by their brutality or the brutality of those who can buy them. Stuck in his jail cell, invoking Shamanic and yogic rituals, Tae-suk trains himself in the art of invisibility. To the increasingly violent rage of the guard, who beats him for "hiding" from him, Tae-suk masters this completely until finally, he can choose whether to be seen or not. Meanwhile, Sun-hwa is lost, performing their simple rituals such as hand-washing her laundry and wandering the streets, dressed again in black but unable to find, on her own, the way back to the secret world she had lived in with Tae-suk. Her despair deepens as she is forced to accept her life with a husband who will never know or understand her, until the day her husband announces that Tae-suk is being released from jail. He is taken from his cell and released, and we see how successfully he has transcended the merely physical as he moves, unseen, through the same homes he has visited while they were empty. Their occupants "feel" a presence, but cannot see him. At the photographer's apartment, Sun-hwa's portrait been more or less reassembled; a moment later the photographer and his girlfriend find the frame empty: Tae-suk has removed her entirely from the gaze of the outside world. He winds up, finally, at Sun-hwa's house, where he allows only Sun-hwa to see him. After a playful interaction in the presence of the unseeing husband, a triumph of spirit over matter occurs when Tae-suk lifts Sun-hwa (no longer in black) into his world and they stand together on the bathroom scale, which now measures their combined weight as zero.This ending seems to have been read in many different ways (I had a strong feeling that the husband would never be able to find his house again, that the whole house had been transformed into a spirit in which the two lovers would live forever), as indeed the entire film has. It certainly can be read as a simple love story or, as Brian T. has made an excellent case for, a Buddhist allegory, but in the end it is a film, and cinema has a language all its own. Reading and deciphering the clues of a poetic and imaginative film is, in itself, a worthy occupation, and "3-Iron" provides a great deal of rich material.A note on the music, for those who were captivated by the song Tae-suk plays. It is a song called "Hafsa" and can be found on Natacha Atlas' 1997 CD "Halim."
