3-Iron (Bin-jip)
To accurately convey what ''3-Iron" is like, this review should probably be blank. The new film from Korea's Kim Ki-duk, who made the celebrated Buddhist drama ''Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring," and a lot of other, tougher films that are just beginning to wash up on these shores (2001's ''Bad Guy" opened yesterday at the MFA), ''3-Iron" is a romance of tenderness and increasingly poignant silence. Its lovers never speak; indeed, that's the measure of their passion. Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.
Its hero, an attentive young man named Tae-suk (Jae Hee), lives between the cracks. His job is to hang restaurant flyers on doorknobs throughout Seoul; he returns a day or two later, sees which flyers haven't been removed, and moves into the empty houses. Inevitably the owners are away on vacation, so Tae-suk straightens up, does the wash, and usually leaves behind one harmlessly surreal prank -- a bathroom scale modified to leave a person weighing less rather than more, for instance.
While settling into one well-appointed house, Tae-suk discovers he is being watched by a young woman named Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon). With the skill of a natural filmmaker, Kim sketches her life through visual and aural clues: expensive furniture, a bruise on her face, a husband's angry voice on the answering machine. The movie is as quiet as the intruder, until the husband (Kwon Hyuk-ho) comes home and the intruder decides to deal with him. If you're wondering whether the title really is a reference to a golf club, this is where you find out.
''3-Iron" then turns into a muted road movie, as the boy and woman inhabit one house after another, never speaking but growing ever closer. The film wonders whether it's possible to absent oneself completely from the world -- as an act of both purification and rebellion -- and, if not, whether you can limit your visibility to the ones you love. This leads to the movie's emotional and narrative payoff, and it's worth waiting for.
Kim's symbolic touches -- the boy rigs up a golf ball so that he can hit it without it actually going anywhere -- are often poetic, vague, and forced all at the same time. With Tae-suk's arrest and subsequent travails, though, ''3-Iron" lifts off into a graceful magic realism. The heart's privileges may not let you change the laws of physics, it hints, but they can allow you to take advantage of the laws that already exist.
On the most utilitarian level, ''3-Iron" makes for a nicely challenging date movie, and it offers a refuge from the week's noisier fare. In particular, there are scenes in the garden of a kind young couple that breathe with the calm of sanctuary. Despite the actors' silence, the performances are full, and grow fuller as the film progresses. This is the rare movie you can relax and walk around in.
It also notes that the human eye is able only to take in 180 degrees of vision, and it strongly recommends using the remaining 180 for our heart's most secret desires. As long as we're very, very quiet about it.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
Video
