Saturday Film Club #1: Take Care of My Cat (Goyangireul Butakhae)

Director: Jeong Jae-eun

Country and year of release: South Korea, 2001 

An unsentimental and absorbing exploration of the uncertainties and growing pains of late adolescence and early 20s, Take Care of My Cat begins with our five heroines graduating from high school. It's a short scene, but it's one that begins the process of establishing their very different characters: Pretty Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won) is walking arm in arm with her best friend Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), the twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eung-ju) are quickly established as the boisterous practical jokers of the gang, with Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) their willing accomplice. 

We then flash forward a year and see the hard reality of their lives now they are grown up. Incheon feels bleak, crime ridden and, at times, poverty stricken. Our five young women have had to find different ways to survive. 

The ambitious Hye-joo has used her contacts to snag a junior role at a brokerage in the nearest big city, Seoul, and is soon to leave her home town for life in the big city. The resigned but sunny twins are eking out a living hawking goods on the street, Tae-hee, who we quickly realise yearns for travel and adventure and a life away from her domineering father, is stuck working for free in his hot stone spa while working as a scribe on a volunteer basis for a writer with cerebral palsy. Quiet orphan Ji-young, meanwhile, is unable to find work (thanks, in part, to her lack of parents) and lives in increasing poverty with her grandparents in their dilapidated house while quietly dreaming of becoming a textile artist.

The cat of the title, a sort of symbolic sixth character, is introduced on the eve of Hye-joo's birthday.  Ji-young discovers the stray tabby kitten on her way home one day and brings it into the house, despite being warned by her grandmother that the animal is 'unlucky'. She painstakingly creates a beautifully patterned cardboard box for the cat and takes it along as a gift for her best friend, who carelessly tears open and discards the box at the start of her party in a local nightclub. The cat, which bears up well under the noise and hot lights of the nightclub, is passed around and fussed over by each of the girls, foreshadowing the ways in which it will be passed amongst them throughout the rest of the film.

The party is also the moment when the importance of pre-smartphone mobiles to the films narrative and aesthetic first becomes apparent. As well as the moment when they play 'Happy Birthday' to Hye-joo using their synchronised ringtones, there's also a beautiful shot of the girls different phones, adorned with distinctive phone charms, each with its own equally distinctive ring tone, neatly placed at the end of their booth in the club. 

The morning after the party, Hye-joo returns the cat to Ji-young, saying she can't take care of it. The young tabby, who Ji-young names Tee-tee, becomes her companion as she works on her textile designs in her cramped bedroom.

The group are frequently on the verge of becoming estranged from each other, with the at times reckless, always adventurous, Tae-hee increasingly finding herself tasked with the responsibility of arranging meet-ups and keeping them in touch with each other. This is often shown through the visual motif of text messages, scrolling across the screen as they are being typed by the characters. 

There are a number of friendship challenging, and eventually destroying, moments along the way and these are often instigated, always unwittingly, by Hye-joo who is increasingly living a very different life to the other four characters. This is not to say that she is happy; of all the various narrative strands, hers is often the strongest. Not because she is the most likeable character, but because what happens to her in Seoul is so relatable: Having snagged her entry level job at the brokerage, she finds herself unable to do the things she needs to do in order to progress in the company, meaning she remains where she is and finds both her youth and novelty quickly replaced by a new intake of staff into the company who quickly progress as she is left making the coffees and delivering the post. We aren't so much told this as come to understand her fate subtly, slight by slight, dismissive comment by dismissive comment, over the course of the film. When she bunks off work to go to an arcade in her business suit to play Pump It Up Dance Floor, her normally tidy hair flies loose as she furiously dances her rage away, and the audience knows her sense of furious impotence and rage like their own. 

By the end of the film, perhaps only the twins (who are the final pair of characters to inherit the cat) are unchanged, and we leave the friendship group as they become increasingly resigned to their situations or prepare to leave for pastures new. 

This is a well observed, often sad, occasionally funny take on the growing pains of late adolescence and early twenties womanhood that is timeless in its concerns and emotional heart.