Kim Ki Duk
Ferro 3

Korean, brilliant, eclectic, detached from the mainstream and the grammar of Cinema, debatable, rude, driven by creative urgency rather than a perfectionist frenzy. Kim Ki Duk tells stories, exquisite experiments that continue to crawl under the skin many moons after viewing.

The expressive rawness of the early works fades into the deep, ecstatic rarefaction of "3-Iron". The most senseless violence now converges into absolute emptiness. Two scenarios with a strong aesthetic impact, realized with the same intent. They are the counterbalance to beauty, the means to flush it out and show it off.

"3-Iron" (Bin-Jip), is Kim Ki Duk's masterpiece, a sublime balance of form and substance. The plot? Finding each other, abducting each other, intoxicating each other, getting lost, rising beyond good and evil. All this, without saying a word to each other.

Love is an airy substance that does not reside in the verb; it is all between the senses and the mind, and what lovers say to each other is like the photograph of a painting, a faded image. Mute as the river is what flows between Tae-Suk and Sun-Hwa, like the mountain, like God himself. But man is not the river, the mountain, much less God. Man is imperfect. The blinding clarity that runs through the film is indeed inspired by pain:  "My characters do not speak because they are deeply wounded (...). They are often told: "I love you," but the person who says it never truly means it; because of this pain, they lose trust and awareness and stop communicating with each other." (Kim Ki Duk).

And then they are different, Tae-Suk and Sun-Hwa. The former roams around on a motorcycle and lives illegally in unoccupied homes, inhabits them instead of the owners, keeps them warm, here today, there tomorrow. She has a house, and a luxurious one, where she is secluded by a husband who deprives her of life itself. They are different, but equally empty. They leave together, wanting nothing more than to get away together. Et voilà, here comes the total void, now indeed the word is definitively unnecessary.

Now that the field is free from social and verbal superstructures, the odyssey of the young has the chance to unfold in all its dramatic sensuality. Two bodies brushing against each other, sinuously, seeking each other in silence. The poignant delight of waiting. The indeterminate pervades the space as well. Love is celebrated in an uninterrupted series of non-places: empty bourgeois homes, the street, prison, the elegant and repellent abode of Sun-Hwa and her tormentor.

The gesture is deprived of all meaning. Those rituals in the clandestinely lived apartments (the young man taking photos of himself, she washing other people's clothes). Or playing golf in the street, with a ball that never takes off.

The story is thus a progressive evaporation of the superfluous. All that remains is to observe the inhuman lightness of these wandering souls that transcend every obstacle, sublimated in Tae-Suk's incorporeal dance in the cell.

This is the cinema of disillusion. The distance between two lovers is unbridgeable, as is that between social classes, as is that between man and the Pure Spirit. Yet, we always try, living is nothing more than acting in that distance. Kim Ki Duk explores these chasms, and he does so with the only possible mood: abstraction. Imagine, therefore, navigating, as if on a cloud, on the most mysterious and significant substance of the human being, and admire the spectacle.

And so, this is the cinema of illusion.