【资料】猫咪少女——Collected English Reviews

阿韩

Synopsis

In the harbour city of Incheon live several women who dream of an outside world, like cats on windows sills. After graduating from commercial high school, the girls all enter society with big dreams - one dreams of becoming a career woman at a security corporation, another types for a poet with cerebral infantile paralysis, and another, with a talent for drawing, aspires to study abroad. To them home is still a place of suppression; a divorced family, no parents, and removal from the family portrait.  

Review

Together with Jur Jin-ho's A Fine Spring Day, Take Care of My Cat was the great revelation of Korean cinema at the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival. Interestingly enough, the two films, though quite dissimilar, can be paralleled. They both offer an insight into women's plight, looking for career opportunities equal to men's though not quite knowing whether they feel any better off. In A Fine Spring Day, the core of the drama stemmed from the opposition between a tradition-bound countryside man and a modern city woman vieing for comfort at the bitter price of love. In Take Care of My Cat, the drama comes from the disbandment of a group of female friends as they mature and the necessities of life take their toll on their idealism.

Take Care of My Cat can be divided into two distinct parts, with the disbandment of the group and survey of each girl's personality as they face the strictures of adult life on their juvenile friendship; and the birth of a deeper friendship between two girls after one of them lands in prison following the death of her adoptive family. In the first part, director Jeong Jae-eun shows how the band falls apart easily because the relationships between the girls only relied on the daily habit of hanging together, not on any deep feelings. As their relationships progress over the years, cell phone conversations start taking over from real conversations. In one meaningful scene, career girl Hae-ju and artistic Ji-yeong, who haven't met for some time, are totally drawn apart in the midst of their encounter because of cell phone calls. The office scenes with Hae-ju are an opportunity for director Jeong Jae-eun to show the secretary syndrome - you know, fetching thousands of coffee cups, dealing with all kinds of archive papers - but also that the least supportive person in a company can sometimes be a person of the same sex. This happens when Hae-ju goes to see her boss expecting someting special only to be sent on a menial errand that sends her spirit down for good.

In the second part, the film slows down as mood - the deepening feelings between Ji-yeong and the rebellious Tae-hee - takes over rhythm. The character of Ji-yeong, who likes to draw and cannot really face life, comes from a family where her father looks down on women and sees their function in society as strictly restricted to making babies. As for Tae-hee, she lives with her poor grandparents who still have to work hard, in precarious conditions, to earn a living. After the fragile corrugated iron roof of their home falls on them, Tae-hee remains alone and would rather go to a detention center than end up facing the world alone. This is when Ji-yeong, who is also alone and needs company as much as her, comes to her rescue, sharing with Tae-hee thoughts of going abroad on a journey - maybe to some "Flower Island" where, as in Song Il-gon's eponymous debut feature, three life-battered women found comfort and a new strength at the end of their collective journey.

The director's strongest point is in showing the lack of solidarity between women who are heir to centuries of disparagement but overlook their problems by succumbing to the ills of modern life. As a first time director, Jeong Jae-eun adopts a non intrusive stance, adapting her style to the characters and what she means to say in certain periods of their life. As time goes by, the characters find it harder and harder to keep in touch with one another. To express this in a visual way, Jeong Jae-eun materializes the cell phone messages they send one another - often to no avail - on buildings and city walls, as if to say that the word communication has lost its human meaning only to be engulfed by the world of advertisement and corporatism. The sense of loss and disorientation which pervades this beautiful and touching film is something which undoubtedly, we have all felt as we were growing older and severing some of our personal connections only to enter into a world of more global connections...

Robin Gatto


Director

Born in 1969, Jeong Jae-Eun studied film at Korean National University of Arts. Her short works include Coming of Age Ceremony, After School, Yujin's Secret Codes and Girl's Night-Out. With Yujin's Secret Codes, she won the Grand Prize at the Women's Film Festival in Seoul in 1999. Take Care of My Cat is her feature debut. Note : at the 6th edition of the Pusan International Film Festival held in November 2001, both Rotterdam and Berlin conveyed their intention to grant the film an invitation, and after much deliberation it was decided to accept a competition slot from the Rotterdam festival. However the Berlin International Film Festival, which in general subscribes to a policy of only inviting European premieres, decided to break with custom and extend the film an invitation where it was screened in the International Forum of New Cinema. Take Care of My Cat has received the NETPAC at the Pusan International Film Festival and a Special Mention from the KNF Dutch Film Critics Circle Award.  
http://www.filmfestivals.com/cgi ... =1&film_id=4720

阿韩

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
http://www.fye.com/catalog/moviesProduct.jhtml?itemId=10857845

阿韩

By Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune





One of the best movies Ive seen recently about the joys and travails of young working gals trying to make their way in the world today is Take Care of My Cat, a picture set far from New York, L.A., London, Paris or any of the other great population or movie centers. Cat, the debut feature of the very talented young writer-director Jae-eun Jeong, is set in Inchon, South Korea, a port city on the outskirts of Seoul. But the problems and characters it reveals are universal and involving, and the film itself -- as well its delightful cast -- is so breezy, pretty and gifted, it really won my heart.

Jeongs movie, a hit on the festival circuit last year, is about five longtime school friends in their early 20s, all beginning to experience the splits and divisions that may ultimately drive them apart. What makes it different from most films of this type is its strong sense of local atmosphere and its rounded portrayal of the young women and their relationships -- the ways theyre bound together by affection, memory and the cell phones on which they frequently chatter.

The natural leader and most ambitious of the bunch, Hae-joo Shin (Yo-won Lee), commutes to Seoul for a menial job at a big corporation. Moody, smart Tae-hee Yoo (Doo-na Bae) works free for her parents and takes dictation from a cerebral palsy-stricken poet who has a crush on her. The bubbly twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (played by sisters Eun-shil and Eun-joo Lee) run errands for their family and operate their own sidewalk business, selling homemade jewelry.



Finally, the most vulnerable of the bunch, Ji-young Seo (played by the similarly named Ji-young Ok), cares for her impoverished grandparents and struggles to survive in their slummy neighborhood. It is Ji-young who finds the starved little cat of the films title and gives it first to Hae-joo, then to Tae-hee, helping set in motion the films complex, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic chain of events.

Cat is an unabashed chick flick; the few men, though well drawn, are peripheral. But its such a smart and engaging chick flick that it should appeal to intelligent, adventurous moviegoers of either sex. Jeong has a real sense of cinematic flow and rhythm, and though she keeps shifting focus between characters throughout, she never lets pace falter or interest flag. She brings Inchon alive, and she sensitively and wittily draws her main characters. She places the vain and self-absorbed Hae-joo (who has begun to succumb to materialism and appearances) and the lower-class cat lover Ji-young (whose life seems always in danger of falling apart) at opposite poles. In between are the lively twins, and at the hot center is the smoldering Tae-hee. Bae, who plays her, is an acting natural who can make the slightest gesture fascinate and make her scenes simmer with quiet tension.

The film has many strengths, but one of its major assets is its solid sight line. Though we might expect it to go sentimental -- with its cute cat, torn families and sympathetic, pretty protagonists -- it doesnt. Jeong is as savvy about young women as she is about cinema, and here she bewitchingly combines them both.




http://www.zap2it.com/movies/movies/reviews/text/0,1259,---15118,00.html

watermelon

i'd like to know where can i download this movie?coz i can't find it in cd-shop.