Reality; Dream; Meditation

Every day, Tae Suk – a young guy in his expensive bike wanders in the different neighborhoods of Seoul. He carries some restaurant take-out menus and purposely places them on the front door lock of arbitrary houses in such a way that without tearing the menu card apart the house owner cannot enter his residence. By the next day, this homeless guy roams again in the same locality to survey which of the menus have left unobserved. This confirms a temporary absence of the homeowner; thus Tae Suk breaks in the empty house and makes him comfortable. He does not steal or creates any nuisance but cleans the respective house, waters the trees, washes clothes, cooks food, eats, sleeps and repairs any broken electrical goods. To keep the souvenir in account, he also takes snaps of himself, usually maintaining the absentee landlord's image (or, say his personality) in the background.

One day he breaks into a big lavish house which is seemingly empty but actually not. The house belongs to a powerful rich businessman; his wife (Sun-hwa) is a former print model. While continuing his usual housekeeping routines Tae suddenly realizes that he is being watched by the lady of the house, who has literally alienated herself from the world by keeping an utter silence, after a violent encounter with her abusive husband (the businessman). With time their unspoken relationship develops in a tacit but intense bond. After confronting (and hitting with golf balls) the cruel husband, Tae takes off again on his bike but this time he is accompanied by Sun hwa. Together, they continue Tae-suk's weird habit of finding and breaking new places to spend each night.

The next act of this film is the most astonishing and I surmise almost all critics will spend 90% of the reviews and discussions on the last thirty minutes or so of the film. We see Tae Suk and Sun hwa are almost forced and fated to be in a relationship; they are reluctant to speak but through the golden silence they can communicate, perhaps in some further level. Tae Suk is homeless in all meanings and for Sun hwa this hazardous but quixotic method of finding homes to stay naturally gives her the impetus of the feeling – freedom. But anyway, after a mishap while changing places to stay, the police trap the duo. Tae is sent to jail (of course Sun hwa's rich husband bribed the cops in a mainstream fashion) and the fugitive wife is back in her house.

While being in jail, Tae by practicing martial arts reaches a higher level of consciousness and thus becomes invisible to the outer world (except, Sun hwa). Others can sense his presence but cannot see him. In the end scenes, we observe Tae and Sun are united again. It is difficult to draw any plausible explanations of the end images. Firstly, the final image of the film is pretty unreal (both are standing on a weight machine where the scale reads zero) which compels the audience to think that Kim-ki Duk is composing a metaphorical unreal world. Truly, the end caption ("It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream") denotes the same notion. I found this imagery has a resemblance with one scene of Solaris (the Tarkovsky one). Remember, how Kris and Hari were both flying in the space-station, holding each other? As par Tarkovsky, this is the state of being in love; the perfect weightlessness.

Secondly, from the previous ventures of Kim (such as his most renowned film- "spring, summer, fall, winter... and spring") we can draw an analogy; the protagonists of Kim belong to a supernatural place. They achieve the state of self-realization (by hardship, by rituals, by suffering, or by the old school martial arts) and thus they become free of the reality, our daily world.

3-iron is a restrained and subtle effort from Kim (unlike SSFWS). Kim maintained his world of silence and we encounter the delicate transcending journeys of his protagonists where they finally transform themselves for higher humankind. I have not seen his latest two ventures (the bow and time) but eagerly waiting to spot if Kim took some diverse methods to depict his unspoken mystic alienated world.

Bin-jip (3-iron - 2004)
Directed By: Kim ki Duk