Though his last movie, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…And Spring was all pretty and pastoral, the exhilarating Korean filmmaker, Kim Ki-Duk, can generally be relied on to put fish-hooks and the like up in some very dark and painful orifices indeed. 3-Iron, his latest offering, is a rather more restrained affair than say, The Isle or Bad Guy, but it does make spectacularly violent use of that dread symbol of bourgeois tyranny, the golf-ball.
Sweetly echoing the ghostly stalker romance of Chungking Express and Rouge, the virtually wordless film playfully follows an enigmatic boy on a motorcycle (Jae Hee) who squats in salubrious pads while the owners are on holiday. A benevolent plunderer, even after rounds of indoor golf, he always manages to scrub shoes, do laundry, and fix clocks before he leaves, a sight which will have many pining for such a break and entry.
On a routine squatting, our hero finds himself being watched by a battered wife (Lee), and after he fixes the weighing scales, he fixes her returning violent husband with several strenuous drives and takes off with the girl. Their idyllic nomadic existence doesn’t last long and between the cuckolded monster and some crooked cops, 3-Iron quickly morphs into a supernatural revenge cycle.
Though the film’s denouement bears an unfortunate resemblance to an existential Ghost and the final inter-title is maddening (‘It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream’), this is a gorgeous showcase for Kim’s painterly, provocative style. Tempering his tender mediation on the intransigence of love with splashes of absurd humour and ultra-violence, at the very least, one can find sadistic enjoyment in the bruising sound of a golf-ball against human flesh. Fore.
Running time: 90mins. Cert: IFI members. Opens: 5 august