Themes: Families in Crisis, Women's Friendship, Faltering Friendships
Main Cast: Bae Du-na, Lee Yo-weon, Ok Ji-yeong, Lee Eun-sil, Lee Eun-ju
Release Year: 2001
Country: KR
Run Time: 112 minutes
Plot
Five girlfriends graduate high school in the Korean port city of Inchon. They set out to pursue their limited opportunities, vowing to continue their friendship into adult life. Hae-joo (Lee Yo-Won) is pretty and ambitious. She gets a job working for a brokerage house and soon moves away to Seoul. Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) works part-time for her domineering father, and does volunteer work, helping out a romantic young poet with cerebral palsy. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young) lives with her grandparents in a ramshackle hut by the docks. She can't find a job, so she struggles to support herself. The half-Chinese twins, Bi-ryu (Lee Eun-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-ju), continue their relatively carefree existence. Ji-young finds a stray kitten, and gives it to Hae-joo as a birthday gift. Hae-joo soon returns it, however, finding pet ownership too much trouble. Ji-young and Hae-joo grow further apart as they discover their values in conflict. Tae-hee tries to keep the group together, organizing sporadic reunions while dealing with her own problems at home. When she goes alone to visit the sullen Ji-young at home, the two realize that their connection has remained strong, and when tragedy strikes Ji-young's family, Hae-joo is there to support her. Take Care of My Cat is the debut feature of writer/director Jeong Jae-eun. She had previously directed several award-winning shorts. The film was processed using the same bleach bypass method used in David Fincher's Seven, which accounts for its unique saturated color palette. The film was accepted into the Rotterdam Film Festival, and New Directors/New Films in New York. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Review
Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat is a bittersweet tale of girlhood friends growing apart, told with visual inventiveness. It's slow-paced, but thoughtful, enlivened by Jeong's panache with the images, and how she connects those images with her insight into the technology-dependent world of her protagonists. As these young women send and receive messages on their pagers, the text blips out across the movie screen. It may seem like a minor touch, but it explicates a ubiquitous aspect of modern Korean life, while also slyly bringing the viewer deeper into the characters' world. In another clever touch that rings true, the women also use cell phones for nonverbal communication, taking great care in selecting the tunes the phones will play when they ring, and even joining forces to play a birthday song with their phones for Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won). The young cast is uniformly good, with Bae Doo-na (as the sweet-natured Tae-hee) especially charming. The script sympathetically captures the particular frustrations of being a certain age, without means, and of not quite knowing what direction to go in. Jeong's skill with character is exemplified by Hae-joo, a shallow striver who stops short of being a caricature. Ironically, it's not when she's among her friends, but when the ambitious girl is suffering the indignities of her hostile workplace that she generates the most sympathy. The images of cinematographer Choi Young-hwan are spellbinding, even when the narrative is not. The flashes of color in the girls' wardrobes stand out against the dull gray backgrounds of the depressed city of Inchon, and the bleach bypass processing of the film brings out this contrast gorgeously. The story veers dangerously close to melodrama toward the end, but it's kept afloat by the filmmaker's cool observational wit, and her genuine empathy for her heroines. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
