HIFF Best friends in high school, from left, Jiyoung, Biryu, Haejoo, Taehee and Ohnjo, find themselves drifting through life and drifting apart in the real world. Even their cell phones and Titi, a cat they pass back and forth, can't keep them together.

S. Korea personal
landscape painted in
‘Take Care of My Cat'

HIFF schedule

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By Nadine Kam
nkam@starbulletin.com

Like "Y Tu Mamá También," "Take Care of My Cat" is a isolation and friendship in a world of haves and haves-not. Where the former film tells the story with sex, irreverence and humor from a male perspective, "Cat" offers an intimate contemplation from female director Jeong Jae Eun, that rings true throughout.

In Inchon, South Korea, cell phones link a quintet of recent high school graduates trying to find their place in the world while drifting further and further apart.

Twins Ohnjo and Biryu are the happiest of the group. They make their living selling inexpensive jewelry in the streets and they have each other. They are so alike their best friends can't tell them apart.

Taehee has worked for a year with no pay for both her father and a handicapped poet who needs help typing his work.

HIFF From left, friends Haejoo, Taehee and Jiyoung leave carefree days behind as they learn to be adults in Inchon, South Korea.

By all appearances, Haejoo is the most successful of her high school gang. She's beautiful, has a job at a Seoul stock brokerage, an adoring admirer and money that she lavishes on power suits.

She constantly berates her friends back in Inchon for their lack of drive and is quick to offer advice and the promise of glamorous jobs should they ever become serious about pursuing a career.

She's also quick to break dates with her old chums due to work or the promise of an evening out with one of the brokerage managers.

But as much as Haejoo strives to get ahead at work -- even getting laser eye surgery after being teased her for wearing glasses -- she can't escape the "value-deficit" label assigned to those in the clerical pool.

To add insult to injury, new female hires claim the professional positions denied to those without a college degree, and she is relegated to serving them coffee.

Haejoo's best friend Jiyoung bears the brunt of her frustrations. Jiyoung is a gifted graphic artist whose skills are neither necessary nor appreciated in Inchon, a gray seaport town producing iron, steel, glass, chemicals and lumber. When she shows her work to her friends, they recognize her artistry but only comment that it must be very boring to sit and draw.

After her parents died, Jiyoung was forced to live in a shantytown under a freeway with her grandparents, and each day brings fewer escape routes from her grungy existence. She dreams of running away to enroll in a textile design school, but as Haejoo points out, her ambition requires money that she doesn't have.

As Jiyoung withdraws from her friends, she finds companionship in a stray kitten she befriends and gives to Haejoo as a 20th birthday present. The gift is returned when Haejoo learns it's too difficult to take care of, like the girls' tenuous friendship.

Taehee finds herself trying to make peace between Haejoo and Jiyoung, but she has unfulfilled dreams of her own. As she hands out flyers for her chauvinistic father's healing stone sauna business, she wanders into a seaman's union hall where she inquires about working at sea, only to be told they are not a cruise line and to go back to her phone calls.

But unlike her friends, Taehee doesn't give in to despair and proves to have strength for two when a tragedy occurs.

The film was the winner of the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Feature at Korea's 6th Pusan Film Festival.

"Take Care of My Cat" Not rated Plays 8:45 p.m. today

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