Save the Cat!

Take Care of My Cat

Now that I was finally able to watch Region 3 movies, I have picked the one title that I did not know anything about, but since it featured Bae Doo-Na, I absolutely had to see it. A slice of life with 4 girls, that made me think of „Linda Linda Linda“ a lot, but in fact, this one is completely different. This is more of a coming-of-age story than a slice of life, in which the four main characters have just graduated from high school and are thus starting to struggle through life. Except one of them, nobody has a decent job, and the one who has a job has quite a miserable one. Nevertheless, they are meeting up frequently and have quite a bit of fun together. Most of all, „Take care of my cat“ is a portrait of the life of five young women and their relationships to each other.

The greatest part of this movie is its realism. Very recently, I have watched an episode of the anime „Eden of the East“ when I realized that I didn’t like how society was portrayed in it. Something of it was wrong, somehow I really hated the scene in which a job-seeking girl got bullied by having soup dumped onto her skirt and how she cried afterwards. I couldn’t quite understand what I have found unrealistic about that scene until I saw this particular movie. Now, compare the character of Haejoo with Saki, the girl from „Eden of the East“. Haejoo is a girl with faults, she is vain, she never helps anybody, puts her career and success before her friends and her boyfriend; Saki, however, is vain in another way, she’s just clumsy and incapable, pretty much an eternal damsel in distress and extremely generic when it comes to anime characters. The way Saki is bullied is very direct and thus rather unusual in today’s society. Haejoo, however, is „just“ being called to make coffee, to do other random small secretary-type tasks without any importance or to go out eating with the rest of the crew, but none of them actually talk to her. That is subtle, realistic bullying, and that pretty much sums up what I liked about this film.

Nevertheless, the film did not come off as tragic, depressing or emo to me. In fact, you did get the impression that we are dealing with very normal and sometimes enjoyable lives here. This aspect is mostly incorporated by the twins, my favorite characters. It’s too bad that they were more some side characters and we didn’t get to know all that much about them, but they were still great. While everyone else is more emo than anything else, the two of them are always ready for a little joke. With that, they brightened up the film for me a whole lot.

With „Barking Dogs Never Bite“, I am going to see about every Bae Doo-Na film I can get my hands of, and this film made me enjoy her performances even more. She’s just so much fun to look at?

Finally, „Take care of my cat“ is an amazing little gem of cinema in my opinion. I find it recommendable, and it makes me wonder how many more movies are going to be overlooked, because they require too much cultural knowledge to access. As for myself, I have loved this film.