USA new releases: Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron [8/10] and Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake [5/10]
3-IRON : [8/10] : South Korea 2004 : KIM Ki-Duk : 95 mins : USA release 29th April
Despite a somewhat flat look to Jang Seong-Back's cinematography, 3-Iron is quite simply a delight. The story is original but essentially quite straightforward: mute twentysomething Tae-Suk (Lee Seung-Yeon) rides around the suburbs of an unnamed city on his motorbike, sellotaping take-away restaurant flyers to the doors of houses. A few days later he passes by again and, if the flyer is still in place, he knows the occupants are away. This enables him to break in – but he Tae-Suk isn't a criminal, more a very active, invasive type of Good Samaritan. He tidies up, fixes broken implements and departs leaving the house in rather better shape than when he'd arrived – to the bemusement of the returning occupants. One day he finds himself in a fancy house with photographs of a model, Seon-Hwa (Jea Hee), on the walls. But as he goes about his usual business, he's unaware that Seon-Hwa is actually still in the house – brutalised into silence by her golf-crazy husband (Gweon Hyeok-Ho). It looks like Tae-Suk has an especially tricky "repair" job on his hands…
After a slowish start, in which Tae-Suk's muteness comes across like a rather cutesy plot contrivance, 3-Iron soon establishes an enthrallingly patient, calm mood – one that seems to emanate from the unflappable, almost infinitely resourceful and practical central character. And of course when Seon-Hwa enters the picture, she too communicates without words – but Kim handles this so nimbly that only the most literal-minded viewer will object. Plausibility really isn't a factor here – and that's just fine. Only in retrospect does it seem odd that none of the houses into which Tae-Suk breaks have burglar alarms; that the holidaying occupants are quite remarkably (and ill-advisedly) informative and specific in the answering-machine messages they (all) leave before they go; that they all seem to return at strikingly inopportune times. And watch how unerringly Tae-Suk he hits his various targets when he starts deploying Seon-Hwa's husband's golf clubs and balls as impromptu weapons.
This is nothing, however, compared with the practiced physical agility Tae-Suk displays in the second half of the picture, when the police finally catch up with him and he's treated to some unexpectedly brutal punishment: what we're watching is very much a morality tale, with Tae-Suk enduring the suffering of a modern, secular kind of saint. He reacts by becoming something rather less (or perhaps more) than corporeal – though to go into exactly how and why wouldn't be fair, as Kim develops the character and his situations with something of Tae-Suk's own innate grace and skill. The final third of 3-Iron combines comedy and tragedy with a metaphysical, transcendent extra dimension of the kind you very rarely come across in cinema – we tiptoe into the sort of wordless terrain more usually occupied by radical modern choreographers like Pina Bausch, without never lose sight of the characters and plot. Because this is a very human, accessible, witty kind of experimental cinema: not quite a hole-in-one, perhaps, but a pretty strong albatross all the same.
Neil Young
seen at Venster cinema, Rotterdam (Netherlands), 31st January 2005 – press show – Rotterdam Film Festival
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
LAYER CAKE : [5/10] : UK 2004 : Matthew VAUGHN : 115 mins : USA release 13th May
Layer Cake is a stylish but ultimately vacuous British crime film, overpopulated, overplotted and lacking the compelling central presence necessary to hold it together – ironic, then, that's is now getting a belated North American release on the back of its star Daniel Craig supposedly being lined up as the next 007.
"Here's two we made earlier" intones uber-chef Marco Pierre White during the Layer Cake trailer, wheeling into view two actual birthday-style cakes iced with the titles of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. 'We' in this context meaning Ska Films, meaning producer Matthew Vaughn. The difference this time is that it's Vaughn himself in the director's chair – and, to retain the culinary metaphor, his moral seems to have been 'if the recipe works, why change the ingredients?'
Layer Cake doesn't adhere completely to the Ritchie template – the crooks on show here are slightly older than Lock/Snatch's aspiring twentysomething ne'er-do-wells, their criminality a suave remove or two away from the kind of GBH and robbery Ritchie's heroes got themselves tangled up in. Our guide is XXXX (Daniel Craig) – the character does have a name, but it's never used in conversation by himself or anyone he meets, and it is also withheld in the narration which bookends the movie: "If I told you that, then you'd be as wise as me." This is the line on which J J Connolly ended his novel – his screenplay adaptation adds a sting in the tail, but the twist isn't to the picture's advantage. Instead, it feels like a desperate attempt to inject some tragic irony and thereby pep up a somewhat weak finale.
Nevertheless, Layer Cake is directed with a consistently watchable stylishness by Vaughn – slicker and cooler than his Madonna-marrying protege – who marshals notable contributions from editor Jon Harris and cinematographer Ben V Davis. He only really lets the side down with his hackneyed choice of soundtrack cuts, including the wildly overfamiliar intro to the Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' intro. In later sections, meanwhile, Vaughn deploys Michael Mann favourite Lisa Gerrard's trademark portentous wailing in an attempt to add instant gravitas.
This doesn't work, because Vaughn and Connolly have never bothered to fill in any substance beneath the picture's alluring surfaces. Vaughn's moments of visual trickery are just window-dressing: pointlessly "cool" touches which ultimately betray his lack of originality, his second-hand aesthetic. Time and again he shows us the mini-Manhattan skyline of Canary Wharf, but with no context, no analysis. It's just a series of expensive skyscrapers on the edge of central London: The Long Good Friday's grim prophecy come to chrome-and-glass non-life.
Neil Young
seen 27th September 2004 : Odeon, Newcastle-upon-Tyne : press show