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There are three controlling men in 3-Iron, Kim Ki-Duk's haunting 2004 film about controlling men. One tries to control a woman, another masters the world by learning to control himself, and the third is Kim, imposing silence on his lead characters for most of the film. The story brings a polite burglar (who steals nothing, does the laundry and fixes appliances) together with a battered wife who's effectively a prisoner in her rich husband's house. Their subsequent sojourns through a string of empty houses brings a kind of freedom that seems to end when they get caught, but then the film takes a slightly fantastic turn that brings them an even greater freedom. The wife and the young housebreaker, a young, college-educated man who's apparently rejected the career route in favor of riding around on a motorcycle and practicing golf in parks, are like ghosts hidden behind the sliding doors of a conservative, corporate-dominated modern Korea.
With this riveting, impeccably detailed followup to the meditative Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring, Kim seems to take inspiration from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's near-silent urban alientation films, especially Vive L'Amour, even down to showing us his protagonist's wiry naked body several times. But where Lee Kang-Sheng's Ah-Kang character from the Tsai films is drifting and ambivalent, 3-Iron's Tae-suk (played by Hee Jae) is wound as tight as a golf ball.
It's just the kind of film I like, one with no easy answers. At the screening Friday night at the San Francisco International Film Festival, we were lucky enough to have Kim in attendance. He looked impish in a black baseball cap and though talking through an interpreter seemed as if he could have gone on answering questions all night. Kim said everything about the movie is open to interpretation -- that any one of the three main characters could have been a figment of another's imagination. And on the silence of his characters in this and other films, he said there are other ways to communicate than through words. They clearly worked in the excellent performances in 3-Iron, which seemed to grip an audience that before the screening had seemed restive and slightly out of place as is not uncommon at the SFIFF. Plenty stayed behind to hear Kim, too. It's great to see a director who really enjoys engaging with his audience.