"I love you".
"Have breakfast"
is all the lines the heroine said from beginning to end. The silence of the male protagonist never feels contrived to the audience from beginning to end. His eyes, his expression, his limbs have said all that has to be said and what should be said. And not saying anything just enriches the character. The transition of the film plot from reality to unreality is natural and smooth.
The background of the male protagonist is not explained, nor is it important. The beautiful big motorcycle is just a prop to take the heroine away from her husband. The infrequent club three [the title should literally translate to "three"] and golf balls on strings are mediums of violence. The purpose of the director's use of these two props is simple: to hit the entrepreneur who is abusing his wife, who in turn uses it to hit the male protagonist, and the latter who uses it to hit the police. This series of blows, blows, revenge and counter-revenge underscores how monotonous and mechanical violence is in our lives. And the aimless blow, hitting a strange woman in the head, which seems to be an unrelated accident that actually reveals the aimlessness of violence and harm to innocent people.
The male protagonist spends a night or two in every vacant house he finds, like the owner and at the same time like a very polite guest, cleaning, doing laundry, repairing broken appliances, taking pictures with the owner, and entering An attempt to enter an impossible world. After the heroine leaves her husband, she and the hero continue a wonderful journey, and step by step approach and get to know this young man who never speaks. The director consciously uses the families of different social classes as the background, which is a basic perspective of seeing society from the eyes of marginalized people. When the hero and heroine find the house with the dead, the story becomes more and more unrealistic in reality. However, the cruel reality makes the unrealistic plot grab the audience's attention. The performance of the sheriff and police officers is logical, just like the prison guard who only represents violence, like one end of a seesaw, balancing on the levers of reality and fiction. The eyes drawn by the youth on his hands finally made him invisible. [This is a metaphor, I'm afraid only the director himself knows what he wants to show]. It seems that people do not need to hold a leaf with a stealth function or cover their ears and steal a bell. The blind spot of everyone's vision makes us unable to see the people and things around us that have nothing to do with us.
The revisiting of the old place after the male protagonist is released from prison is a bit optional, but it also plays a foreshadowing role in making the film enter a climax. The film's most classic scene appears in an almost seamless rendition: the heroine kisses the hero while hugging her husband. This unreal picture speaks to the reality that happens every day, it is the limitations of each of our vision that blind us to it. The last shot at the end of the film is also quite meaningful: the hero and heroine stand barefoot on the scale. The final subtitle is, who can tell whether the world we live in is real or fictional.
It seems director Kim Ki-duk has a deep grasp on the Zen philosophy: language is reduced to directness. This is the best interpretation of the realm where less is better than more, and silence is better than sound.
Note*: This film is translated as "Empty Room" in China. I don't think it is very accurate. The male protagonist in the film is looking for an empty house, not an empty room, which is different. The title of the film released in Chile is "Three Pole".
Note*: Director Kim Ki-duk, born in 60, studied painting when he was young. His father is a veteran and his mother is a housewife. He was a soldier and went to France to study painting in 1990. He used to sell paintings for a living. In 1992, he returned to South Korea and became famous as a script writer and entered the film industry. His works include: "Drifting Room", "Bad Boy", "Coastline", "Spring Goes and Spring Comes Again" and so on.
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