Review of Take Care of My Cat (2001) by Glenn L — 09 May 2016

Wonderful title, characters, storyline, and direction. The soundtrack was good .. but I thought they could have used it more profoundly (though they were close). I am going to ponder this one .. but I very much enjoyed it .. I liked where it was going with the idea of finding success in a capitalistic system, and the fear and up and downs that come with that as people find (or do not find) that success .. and even if they do, does that ultimately satisfy?

SPOILERS.

I would say well defined characters. Several reviews, I felt people clearly misunderstood the images or dialogue.

OFFICE WOMAN: Defines success changing to become like those in power .. but slowly looses her faith in that "reality" bring her true happiness as she finds out .. as she shows her "real self" (wears glasses, looses the shoes, does not want to take night classes to change who she really is) .. she realizes that she has no real worth to the people who determine her future .. with her boss asking her to stay late to do menial tasks and saying she will never be making a proper wage in the same breath. She see new unskilled young people being hired and knows it is just a race of numbers with the many at the bottom, and few at the top.

MIDDLE CLASS: Sort of the "ideal" .. enough social infrastructure sees life from a good perspective .. the follies of the rich and hardships of the poor. In the end she chooses to investigate what happiness is for her .. rich or poor (she says she "envies the beggars as they are free in a sense).

POOR - Under Valued and Utilized - invisible (unheard!) not understood. This is really (in my view) the main character as her pain drives the story (she is also the one who treasurer's the cat "with no place to go"). She has no future or value (monetarily or socially) and feels for the cat more than anyone else. I believe the cat is a metaphor for her own self .. no home and looking for a warm place to live -- like the cat, with no voice except to have someone who can help perceive the need to intervene. Perhaps she is questioning that "cat existence" .... while the girl is being held, she wakes to the sound of a cat outside the barred window ... is that her future?

THE CAT - is passed from person to person - rich to poor - to middle and then the twins. But the main story is clearly the cat's relationship the poor girl. I would like to watch that "TV Documentary on Cats" that was running in the background .. seemed to me it was saying that when faced with starvation a cat will turn on its own to become cannibalistic (maybe I have that wrong).

TWINS - I'm not sure on them - some comic relief and we find out little about their "class in life" - except that they seem content and socially optimized more. If the story continued, maybe we would find out more.

The travel - escape theme - is similar to the 1994 movie Chungking Express (story 2) - but I would say it was a copy without the storyline infrastructure to make it profound. Yes .. we all dream as kids of walking away from the pain we often find once we leave high school to find out that what they taught us in school was not the "real world" at all .. it was not black and white but a lot of grey and much more difficult to grasp and navigate (many people never do grow past that two dimensional comprehension). In this case .. I felt like a two-dimensional solution .. whereas I felt the movie and characters deserved more. The pain of those characters was very well developed and .. perhaps realistically .. we are left to just hope they find their way .. like the office worker .. who did not have the means to survive happily in the world she felt happiness would come from. Will the job's in Australia be the solution .. we see the girl pack a bunch of books, I assume she feels they hold their "answer" .. I could not see what they were.

Take Care of my Cat, is in a nutshell a metaphor that the young are like that stray and wandering cat, using its independence to find a place to survive. The "documentary" on the TV tells how starving cats will eat a weaker cat to survive -- and the Director said this alludes to how, in hard economical situations - even friends will turn on each other.