Friday, July 15, 2005

Kim Ki Duk / 3 Iron

3 Iron

by Kim Ki Duk

Peter Bradshaw

15 July 2005 


What would Peter Alliss make of it? Kim Ki-duk is a director who has been able to combine, in a unique way, a facility for violence with a knack for reticent, even pastoral gentleness: a kind of Punk Buddhism.

3 Iron is an almost wordless movie which follows a burglar, Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon) who breaks in - not to steal but merely stay the night, take a bath, do some laundry. Then he finds a woman, Tae-suk (Lee Hyun-kyoon) who has been beaten up by her husband and without exchanging a word they fall ecstatically in love, and he exacts vengeance on the husband by whacking golf balls at him with the eponymous weapon.

The director shows how Sun-hwa is a corporeal ghost, floating through the lives of the prosperous and the not so prosperous, and Tae-suk passionately joins him in this secret state.

It is not as a good a movie as Kim's Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring, but still an engaging work by a very original film-maker.


THE GUARDIAN



No comments:

Post a Comment