3-Iron2004

This movie is...! And I couldn't find the right words to explain what I think or how I feel about it, except that this hauntingly beautiful masterpiece made me a Kim Ki-duk convert overnight.  I'm not sure what's the relationship of golf or what it symbolises to the story, apart from it being an utterly boring sport. Nevertheless, its equipment can, and is, capable of hurting people. I have to address the elephant in the room here, which is the creepiness, or at least the idea, of the lead male character entering anybody's home. You know it's wrong to come in without invitation, but there's a strange sort of sympathy and understanding he injects to the audiences as he treats each home with care whenever he cleans, washes, and repair things, contrary to what house breaking really means. He doesn't have any ill intent so to speak, he's only there to experience the warmth of a home because it's obvious that he doesn't have one. What I feel for him is sadness, not from disgust, pity nor contempt, but sadness borne out of kindness, from the feeling that there are people who can genuinely love something or someone. Yes, 3-Iron is a love story.  Just like his film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring we linger into long silences and meditation. We see these two people meditate every time they clean; it gives them sheer clarity and the power of mindfulness, it enables them to love. So I suddenly remember Uma Thurman's line from Pulp Fiction about (uncomfortable) silences. That you know you've found somebody special when you can just shut the fuck up and comfortably enjoy the silence. In a nutshell, that's how I interpret the mutedness of the lead characters. People around them just talk and talk,  saying senseless things, while there they are tight-lipped and wordless, at home by the subtlety of one another.  3-Iron is not your conventional love story, but for better or for worse, it is a story about love. People are often invisible to the eyes of those who don't care for them, or probably visible by doing something strange or wrong to the world, but the matter of being "truly" seen is a gift bestowed to the one that loves you for what you are. Come what may, there is a certainty of burden that will be loaded by those who refuse to understand. But when we love we become weightless. We are elevated. And it really doesn't matter if the world cannot see it for what it is. And that's love.