Product Description

Mysterious drifter Tae-suk enters other peoples' lives as easily as he breaks into their unoccupied homes. Instead of stealing their riches, he repays his hosts' unknowing hospitality by fixing broken items, cleaning up, even doing their laundry. But when he sneaks into a sprawling mansion, he discovers a beautiful, lonely wife named Sun-hwa, trapped in a loveless marriage. Without saying a word, the pair begin an erotic game of cat-and-mouse, until her abusive husband returns home, unleashing a shocking burst of violence. Tae-suk defends Sun-hwa with the aid of her husband's golf club. The lovers run away together finding domestic bliss inhabiting strangers' homes. Later, when Tae-suk is framed for a murder, even prison walls can't keep them apart for good.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26789 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2005-09-06
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Korean
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
Words really do get in the way in 3-Iron, a strange, poignant South Korean film from director Kim Ki-Duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring) in which the central character doesn't utter a single word. It's not explained why the puck never speaks, but it adds an element of mysticism to this love story that's at once humorous and disturbing. In this case, the knight in shining armor, Tae-Suk (Hee Jae) is a vagabond who supports himself by breaking into people's homes when they're on vacation. But rather than steal possessions, he cooks himself a meal, carefully washes the dishes, takes a bath, does their laundry, fixes anything broken, sleeps in their pajamas, and leaves each home spic and span. One day he trespasses on the home of a battered wife (Seung-yon Lee) who's still home. Fascinated, she leaves her husband and joins in his adventures, until one of their random break-ins gets them in trouble and the couple is forced apart.

Adding in a reliance on some stunning visuals, 3-Iron does a good job filling itself out in a non-implicit way. In this case, compliments and banter aren't needed to tell you that the pair has found a bond that no one can wrest away from them. The ending may tickle suspended reality (it's either becoming supernatural or someone's a lot more nimble than we thought), but it's still a poetic conclusion to this twisted fairy tale. --Ellen A. Kim

From The New Yorker
Kim Ki-duk ("Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring") wrote, directed, and edited this exquisite modern morality tale that doubles as a ghost story. A handsome young man (Jae Hee) cruises the city on his motorcycle, canvassing neighborhoods both rich and poor and taping a printed flyer to each doorknob. When he returns and finds a flyer undisturbed, he expertly picks the lock and makes himself at home. He bathes, has a drink, prepares a meal from food found in the refrigerator, takes a few digital photos of himself, cleans, makes repairs, and leaves. He thinks he is moving through the world without disturbing it, but there are consequences to his actions. Lee Seung-yeon plays a woman who accompanies the interloper for a time; the two never exchange a word but share a tender romance and a scary, sometimes violent adventure. In Korean.-Ken Marks -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

On The Run
When Tae Suk (Jae Hee) and Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeong) meet or more to the point see each other for the first time, it takes but a moment for them to realize they were meant to be together: one, very quiet moment you see because neither of them utter nary a word during the bulk of Ki-Duk Kim's "3 Iron." In fact, in this movie it is only the loud mouths, the abusers, the malcontents, the bullies, the bad guys who speak out loud and when they do, it usually is a scream, a put down or an abuse.
Tae Suk has an ingenious style of living: he breaks into unoccupied homes and settles down for a night or two. He even does any laundry he finds and neatly hangs it out to dry. He also repairs anything he finds broken: he is the ultimate, caring intruder as, even though he eats whatever is in the refrigerator, he often leaves the home cleaner than he finds it.
It is during one of those "stays" that Tae-Suk meets Sun-hwa, who escapes her abusive husband and joins Tae-Suk in his vagabond ways. Almost immediately, Tae-Suk and Sun-hwa are in sync in what becomes "their" quest to find the perfect home to occupy. One such home is decorated in the traditional Korean-style with a beautiful garden and the two are the most tranquil and at peace there as befits their obviously loved and care-for surroundings.
As with all fables, and "3 Iron" is definitely one, the real world intrudes in the person of Min-kyu (Kwon Hyuk-ho), Sun-hwa's abusive and obnoxious husband who promptly buys off the police and has Tae-Suk arrested and sends Sun-hwa into a major depression.
Director Ki-Duk Kim (the sublime "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring") delicately slices open Korean society and exposes the ugly underbelly and the real brutality the often passes for love and caring. And by extension, he exposes this fakery underneath all societies with the audacious use of wit, humor and a knowing eye on what makes us all tick. That he also creates a romance that rivals that of any modern screen pair just adds to his masterful achievement.

Pixie-like Sweetness & Simplicity
"3-Iron" is a delightful surprise. Kim Ki-duk's "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter" was so lyrical and so cinematically beautiful that it is amazing that this DVD keeps up that film's quality. The fact that most of the film is nonverbal makes this subtitled drama particularly easy for international audiences to adopt. Jae Hee Song as the young lead Tae-suk is good looking and keeps our eyes glued to the screen. The unusual plot of a young man who breaks into houses and apartments while the owners are away is filled with lyrical details. In one scene, he carefully selects a toothbrush before sitting on the toilet brushing his teeth. He seems to experience the lives of the people by seeing their surroundings, cleaning their clothes, fixing appliances & eating their food. Lee Seung-yeon was in a 1996 film about a serial killer called "Pianoman" before taking on the role of Sun-hwa. Sun is an abused wife of a controlling husband. Tae-suk inhabits her house as she quietly observes him taking a bath and reveals herself to him as he lies in her bed self-stimulating to nude pictures of her from an album. Her middle aged controlling husband Min-kyo played by Gweon Hyeok-ho returns from a business trip. He has bruised her face and bloodied her lip and blames her for not picking up the phone and speaking to him. Depressed, she falls into an exquisite wordlessness that suits Tae-suk's observant lifestyle of stepping into other people's lives. After the husband has slapped his wife, Tae-suk launches golf balls into the squealing husband. When Sun-hwa flees with Tae-suk on his motorcyle, they enter a series of other people's homes, relaxing on a red sofa looking out on an interior garden, being in the home of a boxer and finally finding the body of an elderly person that they clean, wrap and bury according to custom. Not each of Tae-suk's attempts wind up benign, however, as he injures a person in a car with a golf ball and perhaps results in the shooting of a young mother. Ju Jin-mo plays the corrupt detective who eventually charges Tae-suk and releases Sun-hwa to the prison of her husband. Tae-suk immediately applies his observation of minute detail to his jail cell, memorizing the floor, exploring the walls and completely making himself at home. Lee Ju-suk is the abusive jailer who repeatedly investigates an apparently empty cell as Tae-suk mirrors each movement and stays directly behind the jailer. It is breathtaking cinema for the incorporation of martial arts-like movement and dance in to the simplest of surroundings. The film concludes with Tae-suk's escape and revisiting of houses into which he had previously broken. It climaxes with him reuniting with Sun-hwa, kissing her as she hugs her husband. "3-Iron" is a wonderful delight, quite different from the heavy-handed car-crash Hollywood-style blockbuster, pixie-like in its sweetness and simplicity. It explores the sometimes small distance between life and dream. Bravo!

Great Korean film
One of the more talented Korean directors working today is Kim-ki Duk whose latest film 3-Iron, was released this year (2005) here in the US and is out on DVD domestically in September. This is the tale of a young guy--nameless-who makes a meager living as a distributor of promo flyers for an eating establishment and also has the habit of breaking into the homes of people who are away so he can eat their food and maybe take a nap. But he's not completely malicious; one of his great virtues is the ability to clean clothes by hand.

One such house he breaks into is that of a middle-aged man with a young wife who's been mistreated. As he goes about his gentle intruder business he doesn't realize, at first, that the wife is right there in the house with him, although her husband is not. It's obvious from her appearance that she's been recently roughed up. She watches him fascinated and finally makes her presence known.

The two of them hook up with each other almost immediately and as one thing leads to another, the convergence of the spurned husband, an angry cop, an angrier prison guard, and the two lovers--along with the game of golf (from which the film derives its title) results in a unique film that, although almost 70% dialogue free, is a really compelling love story.

There's a sequence in a prison cell with the male lead that is truly imaginative, absorbing, even compelling. And the device of the scale being modified (our protagonist is also an expert at "fixing" things) is very clever, especially as shown at the very end of the film when the lovers stand on the scale together and the combined weight is somewhat less than it should be.

Both lovers have the innate (and eventually overt) ability to be "ghost people"; this contrasts with the middle-aged husband's rude, crude persona, as it does with that of the cop and the prison guard. The implication of this, interestingly enough, is that the finer emotions--love, true feeling, compassion--are those experienced by people who are maybe not completely in the world but just outside of it, while those who are very much of this world express themselves roughly, crudely, angrily, making the world what we unfortunately expect it to be rather than what we know it CAN be.

This is a brilliant film and should be seen by a much wider audience. Very highly recommended.