3-Iron – out now

Recently, police in Japan arrested Tatsuko Horikawa, a 58-year old woman who had secretly moved into a man’s flat without him knowing; she had hidden in a cupboard and emerged during the daytime whilst the owner was at work. The 57-year-old man who owned the house became suspicious after food kept disappearing from his fridge, and so he set up a surveillance system, filming the woman as she walked around in his absence.

According to police, she had dragged a mattress into the small space and slept there for nearly a year. French news agency AFP quoted a local police spokesman as saying. “She told police that she had nowhere to live… She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

The story reminded me of Kim Ki-duk’s celebrated 2004 movie 3-Iron, which I caught last year. Titled Bin-jip (’Empty Houses’) in its native Korean, 3-Iron is a film about perception; what people see and don’t see, what goes on behind closed doors and the faces that people choose to present to the rest of the world. There is a noticeable absence of dialogue from the main characters; their emotions are expressed purely by gestures and facial expressions.

The protagonist of the film is Tae-suk, a drifter who makes a living delivering takeaway menus on his moped, which he tapes to the front doors of prospective customers houses. He later returns to the houses that haven’t removed the menus, and believing them to be empty, he breaks in and spends a couple of days living there – by way of repayment, he washes the clothes of the occupants and mends their broken appliances and performs small services to repay the people whose homes he has ‘borrowed’ temporarily.

Tae-suk eventually comes across Sun-hwa, a victim of domestic violence inflicted by the hands of her high-powered businessman husband, after he breaks into their palatial suburban dwelling. After fleeing from the enraged husband, the two begin a silent relationship with Sun-hwa joining Tae-suk on his benevolent break-ins.

They manage to get away with it for so long, due to the fact that their lifestyle pretty much goes unnoticed by the rest of society – without wanting to give any spoilers away, the perception of things and people, and perceiving the way that other people look at things reaches its literal conclusion towards the end of the film.

3-Iron manages to have both a disconnected and dreamlike quality whilst being firmly rooted in the ‘real’ world. The pace of the film is slow, methodical and deliberate, but worth sitting through to see how this unconventional ‘boy meets girl’ story gradually unfolds.

The fact that it required someone to install CCTV in their own home in order to discover that another person had been virtually living in the same house for nearly a year reminded me of how people are sometimes oblivious to the things which are right in front of them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under DVD Rental, Romance, World Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.