REVIEWED - 3 IRON: Whatare we to make of Kim Ki-duk? Watching his grimmest work, one is reminded of a child pulling the legs off a spider.
(Though, if reports are to be believed, worse things than that actually happen to the animals on his sets.) Nonetheless, as the sublime Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring demonstrated, this young Korean director is capable of putting together sequences of great beauty and power.
His intriguing, frustrating new feature - the only film I can think of apart from Walter Hill's The Driver to be named for a golf club - combines the best and the worst of Kim. It is elegant, spooky and thoughtful. It is naïve, pretentious and a little misogynistic.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee), a young, good-looking drifter, breaks into houses when their owners are out of town. He watches television, makes sandwiches, does the laundry and rectifies any minor domestic malfunctions. He is surprised on one of his adventures by a mysterious woman, Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), who, it transpires, is being abused by her wealthy husband. The two young people immediately connect and prepare to embark on an odd, almost entirely mute love affair.
When the man of the house returns, Tae-suk, employing the power of John Daly and the accuracy of Lee Trevino, renders him unconscious by whacking golf balls at him with the titular long iron. Considering what Kim has done to his characters in the past - notably with razor blades in The Isle - the businessman should probably count himself fortunate.
Like a more decorous, urban version of Terrence Mallick's Badlands, which seems chatty by comparison, 3 Iron leads its fugitives through a series of puzzling adventures. They find an old man's body and, to the bewilderment of his relatives, prepare it for interment. They happen upon the fastidious apartment of a couple of Buddhists. Kim seems to suggest that, though others might find spiritual solace in faith or philosophy, the two wanderers are only likely to find it in each another.
At times, the film's obscurity can be irritating, but the finale, in which Tae-suk uses the near supernatural abilities he has learned in prison to evade enemies and promote romance, has the resonance of a fairytale. It makes a satisfying close to an original entertainment.
