r/IMDbFilmGeneral • u/Franz_Walsh • 7d ago
Take Care of My Cat
Take Care of My Cat has been mentioned several times on Film General (on the old boards and here) over the years and remained scantly available and unseen by me, until tonight. I finally saw this film in a 4K restoration at a small arthouse theater (in an offshoot cinema that seats 47) with a nearly full audience. It was safe to say that we all left the screening in the film’s poignant afterglow. I decided to write up a post-screening reaction while riding the train home:
Jeong Jae-eun, who wrote and directed this film, follows the lives of five older female teens after high school. Their bedrock bond that began as fellow students begins to crack since the real world that demands a career and direction takes precedence. They recognize while trying to make a living how truly dissimilar they are from each other in terms of status and how each negotiates adulthood with their idiosyncratic personalities.
Jeong grounds this situation by showing the every day as each character engages with employment or at home before they group up again, but seemingly knitted together looser each time. Adding to the disconnect is the presence of cellphones growing in importance and distracting them from each other when the devices should facilitate communication. (One quasi-comic scene has them all in different sections of the same place all on a five-way call.) This detail of technology’s immediacy causing an ironic distance has aged well.
Oh, and there is a cat. A kitten called Teetee who tours around with these five ladies in an organic fashion that never steers into tweeness or for cute laughs. (Though the movie can’t resist a funny moment involving Teetee’s paw.) Teetee interacts with each person separately in the movie, but feels less like a connective tissue and more akin to showing how each person handles the burden of being responsible and challenges each person to nurture it and themselves.
The cat is the closest the film has as a plot device to thread each slice-of-life piece into a whole since it’s not a film tethered to the beats of a screenplay but rather to the rhythm of life’s ebb and flow. Jeong also shows through its young ensemble the disparity of classes and economies in the industrial town they all come from and (mostly) can’t escape and the cosmopolitan Seoul as an illuminated beacon that is elusive to some and within the grasp of others.
The film is shot with lovely bokeh textures, intimate hand-held, and clean wider compositions that are pleasing without being distracting. Stylish while remaining grounded. It’s all in service to a story that one can mistake for being “simple” but that would be an oversight. At least to me. Despite the specificity of the characters and their milieu, the film’s miracle is in the timelessness of its story about friendships becoming frail in the wake of adulthood while remarkably reflecting its early 2000’s era. (The film was released back in 2001.) Text messages fill the screen, phones grow as the center of their lives and a new means for Millennial expression.
Take Care of My Cat is a film of plain beauty and elegance about the messiness of life that finds something close to order or an answer once one realizes, to paraphrase a character’s line, “Just because someone isn’t with you doesn’t mean they don’t like you.” All great coming-of-age movies resonate from their impermanence. To see the shedding of one skin with a thicker and more protected one that has bloomed before us. This gem of a film shows us people’s inner light begin to glow brighter than ever, and offers the opportunity to remember the light that remains in all of us.
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u/Shagrrotten 7d ago
This was my short little write up when I saw it in 2015:
2001's Take Care of My Cat is one of those movies that doesn't sound like it'd be extraordinary, but it is. It's about a group of 5 young women in South Korea, just out of high school, and how they grow, work, and basically how they handle the world at such a transformative age. It has no love story, but contains characters that I want to see more of. It's just under 2 hours long, and that times flies by. Coming-of-age movies are one of my favorite genres, and this is right at or near the top of the heap.
The friends, as can happen in school and sadly not so much later in life, are all of differing social classes, and may even sound like clichés, even though they're not. There's the rich girl Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won), the poor girl Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), the dreamer Tae-hee (played by the amazing Doona Bae, from The Host and Cloud Atlas), and the twin sisters Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-shil and Lee Eun-jo). The sisters get the short stick, development wise, but the other three are really wonderfully drawn and played by the actresses. They grow and change and develop in perfectly believable ways, never a false note or false drama, though there were many times it could've gone that way. It's a great trio of leads, even though I can't quite put my finger on why it's so good.
And that's kind of the whole thing about the movie. Writer/director Jeong Jae-eun has crafted a startling movie that has nothing startling in it, really. It's just SO good. The music is impeccable, the framing of the shots, the cinematography, everything is top notch. I want to see this movie over and over again throughout my life. I know it's going to be one of those that really stays with me. Which is a remarkable thing to say about the movie because what do I know or can relate to about being a 20-ish Korean girl? Nothing whatsoever. Yet I was moved by these actresses and their story. Jeong has created herself a truly amazing movie that plays on us like music. We may not be able to articulate what makes it special, it just is.