3-Iron

Aroview: Odd, elliptical love story from the dir. SPRING, SUMMER concerns the blossoming romance between a domestic abuse victim and her savior, a compassionate home intruder.

After liberating the film’s battered housewife with the aid of a golf club (fore!), the mysterious squatter silently nurses his damsel back to health, before succumbing to the events of a questionable third act. Trading in minimalism and mute existentialism (neither of the main characters talk), this is very much par for course for dir. Kim, whose benign, dream-like images of tranquility and longing – but not without occasional bursts of violence – fit comfortably into a cache of meditative Asian cinema. A tender antidote to the bourgeois attacks of Michael Haneke, sharing similarities (though not necessarily an affinity) with the urban alienation pieces of Tsai Ming-liang.

NZ International Film Festival 2005