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Life in Twenty is like Cat.. Their Secret Message
Variety
Five young women find their friendship and dreams tested in the fires of post-high school life in Take Care of My Cat, an engaging, highly-accessible movie. With its wintry setting in the grungy port city of Inchon and its focus on the social divisions between the girls, the film has a more European flavor than most youth-centered Korean movies. Jeong Jae-eun's avoidance of cliches like sex, drugs, and discos keeps the focus tight on the girls' fluctuating friendships. Their ties are held together by that special Korean obsession, the cell phone. Jeong passed up fashionable Seoul for the movie's setting as Inchon better reflected the flux and unease in the girls' lives, as well as their dreams of escape abroad.--Derek Elley
Filmmaker
Jeong Jae-Eun's Take Care of My Cat, deserves special mention, not only for being one of a handful of Korean films directed by women, but also for setting its tale within the working-class town of Incheon rather than the usual slick Seoul backdrops. --Jason Sanders |
Five girlfriends in their early twenties live in the dingy port town of Incheon. A close-knit circle in high school, their paths begin to diverge as they step into the adult world.
At the center of the group is the beautiful and vain Hae-joo, who dreams of becoming a successful career woman. She leaves Incheon for an apartment in Seoul and a junior position with a brokerage firm.
The other girls are left behind in a state of solitude and unease; Tae-hee works for free for her parents and takes dictation from a poet suffering from cerebral palsy and Ji-young seeks a job, while caring for her grandparents in their dilapidated apartment. The twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo buffer themselves from change with constant togetherness.
The cellular phones ring as the girls coordinate their meetings. A lost cat, Tee tee, enters the lives of these young women, passing from one owner to the next as circumstances pull lives and friends apart and others together. |
Ain't It Cool News, Sept. 8, 2002
I can tell you, this Korean hidden gem is gonna be overlooked and got overshadowed by other high profile "women films" in this festival like "8 Femme/8 Women." But if you're into "women films," or what the heck, if you're just into films, "Take Care of My Cat" is a very interesting piece of work that you should go check out. It's about the friendship of five Korean girls after they have graduated from high school. And while most people think of women films, they must be thinking of their love stories and the female characters' connection with guys and some tiring stuff like that. But "Take Care of My Cat" is not about that. It's about how their friendship slowly dissolves when those girls got separated by their different social experiences when they've graduated.
Although there're five girls but the movie basically focuses on three of them. One girl is the most beautiful of the five, who is also arrogant and doesn't care about what others think. She got a secretary job in a brokerage firm but not satisfied for her career aspect there. But she's already the luckiest compared to others. On the other hand, her best friend in high school isn't that lucky. She lives in the poor squatters and cannot find a good job. Her parents are dead and she has to take care of her sick grandparents. She is good at drawing pictures but her potential is never discovered. There's another girl, who is the most cheerful and lovable, often dreams of going elsewhere and wanders around the world. However, she's also the only one who has a lot of heart and care for their friendship.
What I love about this film is that it's so subtle with a lot of sensitivities for the characters. There're not really good and bad characters in the movie; in other words, they're just people. They misunderstand and start to abandon each other notbecause they're heartless but simply because they're constrained by their circumstances at that moment. More, this movie does show something that has happened to most of us: Your best friend right now may not be your best friend in future. On the other hand, to your surprise, you'll later in life find out that the friend who helps you the most is the one you never considered as your best friend in the past. Life is just full of irony.
"Take Care of My Cat" is a very good film that really cares about the characters and take the subject matter of female friendship seriously. And the film has something pretty creative too, such as the pop-up screens of those girls' cell phones that show the messages they page and email for each other. In addition, the film is realistic and brainier than most brainless teenage films and comedies in North America that are all about guys and girls looking for sex after they graduate from high school. "Take Care of My Cat" is about real people who have to find a job and worry about their life and future, and make tough decisions for making compromise between the hard reality and their wild dream. -- Jan Chik |
         
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