Ghost Story

[chani]

Finally here's the review of  a terrific Korean movie by Kim Ki-duk. It's the third film by that director that I've seen, the others being the beautiful but painful "The Isle" and the quiet and aesthetic "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and...Spring". This one, still very well shot, is even better. Forgive me for my msitakes and my (bad) puns...

A young man breaks into vacant houses...but he is not a thief.

He may be looking for a home. Actually he's borrowing homes while the owners are away. By the way he's used to take pictures of himself as the homes were his.

And he takes care of those homes, picking up clothes that lie around, doing laundry, fixing things like a little sprite of whose work nobody is aware. He's a true "fée du logis"!

One night he gets into a house he believes to be empty, and is met by a woman with bruises on her face.They don't talk to each other, he even leaves, but can't help coming back. When the husband returns and starts abusing her again, violence ensues as usual in Kim Ki-duk's movies...Our "hero" uses golf-balls to hit at the abusing husband with his own club, his 3-Iron. The golf-balls become a leitmotiv in the film.

BTW the opening scene shows the net into which the golf-balls are put...because of course it's a fake game, a mini-golf in a garden or in an apartment, they don't play golf in an open field.

That "opening" net is probably the metaphor of the narrow confines of their lives. There might also be a sexual meaning behind those balls (don't laugh!), since the husband lying on the grass, moaning, could say that "balls hurt" (sowwwy) and especially later when he takes his "courage" in both hands and picks up a couple (yeah exactly 2!) of balls to take revenge and hit the young man in jail...

Because that man took his wife away! Indeed, that night, the beaten wife followed the stranger in the night after he hit her husband in the garden.

So the abused wife escapes thanks to the boy....

Of course he's gonna fix her as he usually does with the broken stuff in the houses he squats. Kim Ki-duk's movies always work on a metaphorical level! This one is about emptiness and silence, since the film is mostly without any dialogue (actually the lead male doesn't say one single word at all and the female screams once at the beginning and says only 3 little words in the end, THE 3 little words). Yet the silent Bonnie and Clyde-y couple manages to communicate better than the others. Both actors do wonders btw and the pictures speak volume. It is everything but boring.

Not only the abused wife follows him but she adopts his routine and we see them breaking into various empty homes, wealthy or poor, spiritually charged or not. Emptiness is beyond social classes!

They live in those borrowed homes, eat and work and even love each other, like the ghosts of the missing couples...

But who are the true ghosts? Don't they live the owners' lives better than them?

Of course the breaker is metaphorically the one who makes the "inside" unlocked, who unveils the secret kept within the homes. He enters houses but doesn't steal anything. He doesn't take, he gives. The only times he steales something is when he takes a picture of the woman, leaving the frame empty on the wall, and metaphorically freeing her again. 

In the end, we're left without any answers while our hero seems to be haunting the houses he has visited before and eventually settle himself as a ghost in HER home without the husband noticing anything . Did he become skilled enough to play the perfect invisible ghost and squat the houses while they are not vacant or is he simply.......dead? I do think he's dead.

I think that his own body was a home he inhabited for a while and eventually left. The whole film would be a metaphor of life and death.

3 is a magic number in the movie...There's the 3-Iron used as a weapon, the 3 little words she says finally, the 3 main vacant houses the lovers visited together(the photographer's one, the zen one, the boxer's one) and maybe 3 dead people: the woman he killed by accident when hitting a golf-ball in the street, the old man they found in the fourth house (in which there's still someone even though he's dead)where they are arrested...and the third body being the hero himself if I'm right.

Besides when we find ourselves in the boxer's home for a last time with our ghost hero there's a clue, a sign representing death: the eyes on the picture are covered with paper. I recall it's a symbol, the director used in "Spring, Summer etc" too. He's telling us that he's dead, he's no longer pretending to be a ghost, he has become one.

So I think that the cops killed him after they took him out of his cell but the film doesn't resolve it. Various interpretations are possible. The police ringing the husband to apparently warn him or the scene with golf balls hitting the corrupt cop in the garage may be the clues that our hero broke free indeed...

So we can believe in that poetic ending and that incredible "ménage à trois" in which the husband cannot see the lover.