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PLOT: A young motorcycle-riding vagrant "squats" harmlessly in the homes of people who are away on vacations and business trips. One day he encounters an abused ex-model in a home he'd thought vacant. She joins him to escape her plight.
The year's least-necessary subtitles are attached to Ki-duk Kim's haunting 3-Iron, an almost dialogue-free movie that is as moving as words could hope to attain.
And gorging as we do these days on half-baked goods from the Hollywood cookie-cutter, you might be surprised to find out how starved you are for something utterly different in a movie. The Korean festival fave 3-Iron fits the bill to a tee (ouch, no more golf puns, I promise).
The movie has elements in common with Kim's recently-released creep-fest Bad Guy (the mute central character and scenes of surveillance), but it has a lightness of heart and gentle sadness that lifts the spirits of the film and the viewer simultaneously.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee) is a handsome, brooding young drifter on an impossibly-expensive BMW motorbike, and he has an unusual modus operandi. Finding a neighbourhood that looks promising, he goes door-to-door stuffing noodle-house flyers in the slot. He returns a day later and picks the lock of the best one where the flyers remain untouched -- those invariably being the homes of people on vacations or business trips.
There, he cleans up, avails himself of the food, liquor, TV and music, and honourably makes minor repairs and does the homeowner's laundry.
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This carries on fairly smoothly until the day he breaks into a high-end house that isn't exactly empty. After being beaten by her brutal husband, a former model named Sun-Hwa (Lee Seung-yeon) has been hiding despondently in a closet.
She's at first fearful, and then intrigued by the intruder as she watches him. When her husband enters the picture, the roles are reversed, and Tae-suk becomes the ghost, stalking her playfully.
Things come to a head, however, when her husband begins beating her again. Tae-suk uses the husband's 3-iron (the least-used club in a golfer's bag, for those into metaphors) to smack balls at him and incapacitate him, and our lovers ride off to share their life of vagrancy.
What the golf club means to Tae-suk is open to interpretation, but it becomes his totem of freedom. He ties it to a bungie and attaches it to poles or trees or whatever, so as to practice his fairway shots wherever he and Sun-Hwa are. After they are inevitably discovered and he ends up in jail, he pantomimes the motion of his swing, Johnny Carson-like, to keep his sanity.
It is in prison that Tae-suk completes 3-Iron's character arc, losing his humanity to actually become a "ghost," perfecting an ability to so mimic the movements of guards and avoid their line of peripheral vision that he gains the de facto ability to "become invisibile."
So lyrical is the movie in its wordlessness that it is practically a dance piece. And for a movie essentially without dialogue, it gives audiences plenty to talk about.
(This film is rated PG)