Grand Prix 2005 — Best Film of the Year

It seems obvious and even needless to say that cinema is above all moving image. Unfortunately, under an avalanche of films in which text seems to be all, and that barely use the camera to record the dialogues; of documentaries that you could watch with your eyes shut, just listening to testimonies like on the radio; under this avalanche, to recall that film is above all moving image is almost a battle cry.

With all its visual sobriety, 3-Iron (Bin-jip) pays a beautiful homage to that very concept. Kim Ki-duk's poetic film is certainly a charming fable of love between Sun-hwa, the stealthy young man who occupies other people's homes for a day, and Tae-suk, the beaten wife who flees with him. But it is also a passionate love song to the image. In calling it this, it's not just a question of the scarcity of words (spoken and written, since the filmmaker resists the easy option of compensating for the lack of dialogue with an overabundance of written texts), which of course results in a pre-eminently visual narration. Image is not just the story's vehicle, but one of its fundamental themes.

Throughout most of the film, words remain essentially obscene, if we accept the non-standard etymology of "off-scene," which makes it especially disturbing when Tae-suk declares her love out loud. Up to then, words are used mostly to threaten or offend. The only time that Sun-hwa articulates something (the place where the old man is buried), it is not represented in the scene and we find out only through the police officer.

In 3-Iron, all that is essential has to do with the image. Reality and fantasy (however elusive the limit between the two may be, as the text at the end states almost unnecessarily) are composed through visual representation. To exist, one must hide, or, on the contrary, expose oneself. Sun-hwa intrudes into homes without being seen in order to be someone – a different someone each time – whereas Tae-suk, who hides in her own house-prison as if trying to disappear, exists in the outside world through pictures. It is through the image – or its denial – that the two construct themselves or nullify, so as to reconstruct, themselves.

Kim Ki-duk favors two types of visual representation: photography and gesture. The former replaces presence; the latter replaces action. In his need to create an identity for himself, Sun-hwa portrays himself in the houses, posing beside the pictures of the inhabitants. (These self-images are all that he takes from each residence, and the only traces that eventually expose his trespassing.) For her part, Tae-suk announces her total complicity by entering the scene in front of the lens.

Also, she is a model, and her idealized image chases her like a cruel and paradoxical reflection. When in the beginning she screams over the phone, the pain of her tormented body and soul contrasts violently with the peace and wholeness of the portrait in reverse angle. Later, when she confronts this idealization in the photographer's apartment, she decides to intervene, to leave a trace (in a challenging transgression of a tacit rule) through her own image: she mutilates and reconstructs it. Perhaps to make it reflect more faithfully the twisted reality? Then when the photographer corrects it, he leaves a part of that scar. And when Sun-hwa goes back to the houses towards the end, the only thing he steals is that picture.

Another fundamental element in 3-Iron, which allows Kim Ki-duk to play around further with the thin line between reality and fantasy, is gesture, understood as the visual representation of an action through its characteristic movements. Without words, it is through Sun-hwa's gestures that the filmmaker constructs the character. Though the silent intruder performs actions in the houses (he eats, he washes...), the material act is not transcendental. The film quickly demands the spectator's complicity with the story's unreality, and one of the first issues is that these concrete actions leave no traces; the residents don't notice his presence until they see the pictures. What matters about those actions, particularly thanks to the editing, is their ritual repetition, the gesture that Sun-hwa – and soon Tae-suk too – performs.

Within the film's logic, the gesture can be as real as the action. That's why even if the two protagonists believe the golf ball is firmly fastened, they both attribute all the mortal menace to the gesture each time she stands in front and he refuses to hit. Likewise, in jail he reaffirms his identity by repeating his former gestures, while the soundtrack reinforces the ambiguity between what is real and its representation when the mere gesture of hitting the ball produces the sound.

This fantastic logic, in which gesture is as real as action and thus can substitute action, applies only to them. In their world gesture is as real as action, and thus takes over for action, in the world of others it becomes action; fate can prevail over intention with tragic consequences, as in the first apartment we see Sun-hwa enter, when the playful gesture of shooting a supposedly broken gun becomes, thanks to the visitor's good intentions, an act of violence.

It is also what happens on the night they brutally face the bitterness of reality. When these beings who are nearly ethereal, as the scale confirms at the end, become more human in the boxer's house – they drink, they make love – they are discovered, with the result that Sun-hwa is physically wounded. Moments later, the gesture that they once again acknowledge as dangerous (he does not want to hit the ball in her direction) escapes his control and mortally collides with the world of others. The resulting moral wound is much deeper, and it opens the way (perhaps because of the need for expiation) to Sun-hwa's final glide towards reality, before he definitely vanishes into fantasy.

Each of them experiences this fall into the world of others in the opposite way. For her it's time to confront reality (i.e., her husband) firmly and daringly instead of trying to efface herself, while preserving the bond with the absent lover by performing their rituals or returning alone to one of the houses simply to get a moment of peaceful rest. On the contrary, he strives to disappear. His clothes fall in a symbol of his progressive abandonment of the material world and its laws. However, he cannot abandon his shadow. He cannot obliterate his own image completely.

Then how can he disappear? Eluding the presence of others is no longer enough. He must be able to become invisible in the midst of the world. The only thing left is to dominate vision, expanding his own (the eye painted on the palm of his hand), but with the purpose of escaping the others' vision. That is why the final challenge is to return to the houses without being seen, though this time announcing his presence and leaving an overt trace. Sun-hwa covers the eyes on the boxer's picture so that the boxer cannot see him, underlining the subtlety of the difference between the subject and its representation.

Yes, 3-Iron is an exquisite romantic tale. But it is also, or mainly, a reflection on what is essential to the cinema, an art based on visual representation. Sometimes an artist can succeed, like Sun-hwa, in dominating our vision in order to blur the boundaries between presence and image, between action and gesture, and leave a trace as the sole certainty of reality.

Pamela Biénzobas
© FIPRESCI 2005

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