3 Iron

     

Some months ago, I began slowly but methodically watching Korean movies. Korean dramas are quite famous for their raw emotions and slightly melodramatic content. But I did know that there are some really good movies that stand out among them. One director to look out for is Kim Ki Duk, who has been slowly and steadily gaining popularity among critiques and fans alike.

The first movie that I happened to see was “ 3 Iron” , that I found in the shelves of my university library, NTU, Singapore.  Made with calculated restraint, extreme sensitivity and subtlety, this movie could well be part of movie making syllabi. Kim Ki Duk is a tour de force and I was so impressed with his style and content , that I wasted no time in seeing a lot of his other works. But all that will come later. For now, 3 Iron it is!!

The first thing I noticed is that for the initial 15 min, there are no dialogues whatsoever. We get a glimpse of the hero, who lives life as a man on the move, pasting pamphlets on the doors of houses and then coming back at night to see which doors have not been opened, thereby confirming that the house is vacant of its inhabitants. Then he would break into that house, and spend the night there.  He would cook himself a meal, and after that he would go around the house picking all the dirty clothes and do the laundry. At times, he would also repair some broken gadget, an alarm clock, an air rifle etc, probably seeking solace in this so called good deed.

One day, he breaks into a house assuming it is empty, but huddled in a corner of a room is the lady of the house, a victim of domestic violence. He is not aware of her presence, but she sees all his eccentric ways but keeps mum. In fact, I doubt if she spoke even five complete sentences in the entire movie, but she was all the more conspicuous because of this pained silence. Her face mirrors sadness and more than that, a complete loss of hope or any desire for life. The husband comes back at night, and begins to abuse her once more. Not willing to see her suffer, the hero, rescues her by hitting the husband with a golf ball using the “3 Iron”, a lesser used golf club.

The lady decides to leave the injured husband, a tough decision considering she is helpless in the outside world. But some inherent loneliness in the hero forges a kinship between the two, and they go off on their bike, with the “3 Iron” appropriated by the hero. So begins a shared life of breaking into homes, spending nights, and all is good until one day, while practicing his swing with a golf ball tied to a tree trunk, he accidentally hits a couple travelling in a car. United by pain and loneliness, and something more than that, they share a night full of pain and guilt, then succumb to their need to love and be loved. In this manner, they become lovers, companions and reflections of each other. But one day, the hero gets caught by the local police, and the enraged husband comes and takes the lady away.

The narrative /screenplay flows like water, and a lot of emotions are depicted and silence is used as a potent tool throughout. Towards the end, the movie takes on a surreal feel when the hero in prison resorts to some optical illusions with the guard. He is later released, and word of that reaches the husband and the lady. In a bizarre end, we see that the hero, having mastered the art of making himself almost invisible, and imperceptible, is living in the same house as the lady, with the husband entirely ignorant of his existence. The very final scene is beautiful (which I’ll not divulge!!) and you see the credits rolling with a vague sense of warmth and sadness.

A must watch for all lovers of good cinema.

Bol: Speak out

 

           

Ironically, I have no words to speak in praise of this movie. Shot in Pakistan, Bol, directed by Shoaib Mansoor ( of Khuda ke Liye fame), is a lesson in courage. The story begins when Zainub Khan has been found guilty by Pakistan's Courts and is to be hanged. Her last wish is to tell her story before the media, and after approval, she relates how her family was compelled to leave Delhi during 1948 and re-locate to Lahore. This is where her father, Hakim Sayed Hashmutallah Khan, married Suraiya, and hoping to sire a son, instead ended up with 7 daughters. The 8th child turned out to be a hermaphrodite and Hashmutullah wanted it dead but Suraiya insisted that she will not let anyone know so as not to shame her husband. They named the child Saifullah, and hired a tutor to teach him at home. After a failed marriage, Zainub returns home, notices that the tutor was molesting her brother and asks him to leave. With dwindling income from his father, unable to attend school, his mother giving birth to still-born babies, his siblings uneducated, Saifullah is then himself compelled to seek employment. In his work place, he gets sexually molested and returns home bearing wounds of his torture. The poor victim is subsequently killed by his father, who somehow prefers to strangle his son than live with the shame of his plight. In the process, he has to bribe the police by embezzling Rs.2 Lakhs from the Masjid where he presides as a Khajanchi. In order to return the money to the Masjid, he starts to tutor children of prostitutes with the help of Saqa Kanjar. When their neighbor's son, Mustafa, proposes marriage for his daughter, Ayesha, he refuses, as they are Shiah, and plans to marry her to a much older male. Things change rapidly when Saqa makes a proposition that will change everyone's lives forever.


What is palpable throughout the movie is the absolute dominance of the staunch, Quraan quoting father, played to perfection by Manzar Sehbai so much so that one would wish to strangle him for bringing such misery to the lives of his wife, his helpless daughters, and his eunuch son. He is a God faring man, who follows the holy book to the T, yet sees no fault in treating his daughters as mere objects. His double standards reach to intolerable heights when we see that he goes groveling to the same low caste pimp for money to teach his kids lessons in Quraan whom he had literally treated as an untouchable in an earlier scene. But even more appalling is when he agrees to sleep with the pimp’s granddaughter, Meena, with the belief that since he has sired 7 daughters, he would probably impregnate Meena with a daughter too, and then this girl would become a star prostitute in the future. All this is conducted secretly, with no clue to his family, in the same matter of fact manner as when he strictly forbids the marriage of his second daughter to her lover, who happens to be a Shiah.


But the title “Bol” stands for one person’s constant efforts to curb this patriarchal dominance in the household. That person is the eldest daughter, who has been a victim of domestic violence in her husband’s house, and who is back in her parent’s house only to bear witness to her father’s unbending ways. I lost count of the number of times he thrashes her, as the number of times she speaks out, entreating, with love and respect, beseeching him to let the girls work and help him financially. Throughout, the heartless father treats her like a slut, yet she and her hope for change endures. The last thing that she asks everyone gathered, before her hanging, is that if killing your children for the sake of honor is unacceptable, then so is giving those children birth and then not living up to the responsibility of bringing them up with love and care.


Two things that stand out in the movie, and infuse the narrative with lyricism and beauty are the mellifluous music and the Urdu that the protagonists speak even at the most mundane scenes. Songs like “ Din pareshaan hai”, “Hona tha pyaar”, “Dil Jaania” give voice to the multitude of emotions that the characters feel, especially the hapless son and daughters , who snatch moments of joy and fun only when their father is out of the house. “ Kaho, aaj bol do” is a rock concert song that one of the daughters and her boyfriend, Mustafa, played by Atif Aslam, sing, inspite of the fact that she would never attempt to do that in front of her own father.


In all, a very beautiful movie, giving voice to an emotion commonly born when in the name of religion and enforced morality, hapless people are subjugated and made bereft of freedom and their right to happiness.