The More Things Change

by
Howard Schumann

33-year old director Jae-eun Jeong's 2001 film Take Care of My Cat is a perceptive coming-of-age film about five young Korean women trying to cope with the transition from high school to the adult world. It is an honest work that avoids genre clichés of sex, drugs, and even boyfriends. The film received a major award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2002, but did not gain proper recognition until its DVD release this year. The title refers to a stray kitten, Tee tee, which is passed between the five girls and, as circumstances pull their lives apart, serves as a connection between them. The bleak working-class environment of Inchon establishes the mood of the film. According to the director, "Inchon is a city with many immigrants who came during the war or in the 70s during industrialization. It is a city full of wanderers that matched my characters who were outsiders."

The girls are in constant movement. Whirling through the city on subways and buses between work, clubs, and restaurants, we get a sense of their optimism and energy. Programmed to play entire melodies, their cell phones ring constantly as the girls coordinate their meetings and activities. In a clever gimmick, the director floats the text messages on the screen, in bus windows, and building walls. While it took me a while to get to know each character, each one has a strong and distinctive personality and, by the end, I felt involved in their lives.

Hae-joo (Yo-won Lee) is the most outgoing and self confident, but can be self-absorbed and insensitive to others. Through connections made by her affluent family, she lands a job as an assistant in a brokerage firm. Although aware of the fact that she is a "low-wage" earner without much of a future at the company, she becomes fashion-conscious, carries a Louis Vuitton bag, and is acutely conscious of her appearance, spending money on laser surgery for her eyes. When she moves to Seoul to advance her career, it further strains the relationship with the others. Ji-young (Ji-young Ok) is the opposite, a soft-spoken, sensitive young woman who lives in the poorest section of town with her grandparents in a run-down shack and cannot find a good job. She lacks the means to develop her considerable potential as a designer artist and is prone to moods of sadness and withdrawal.

Tae-hee, in an outstanding performance by Doo-na Bae, is the glue that holds the friendships together by arranging meetings and bringing people together. She works for her father in his traditional "hot-rock" healing spa and, in her spare time, types for a poet afflicted with cerebral palsy who has developed strong feelings for her. Twins Bi-ryu (Eun-shil Lee) and Ohn-jo (Eun-joo Lee) play minor roles as they try to scrape together a living hawking jewelry on the street, but their characters seem included more for comic relief than to further the plot. The girls' world seems strange to the older generations, but the harsh reality of survival is constant, their ambitions often at odds with the male-dominated society. Ji-young wants to be a textile designer but is unable to go to school, Hae-joo wants a respectable job in the business world, and Tae-hee dreams of escaping from the suffocating restrictions of her family, though recognizing that running away is "so tacky".

Take Care of My Cat has no peak dramatic moments, no plot contrivances that propel us toward certain emotional responses, only the sad undercurrent of the inevitability of change in a confusing world. Backed by a moody electronic sound track by Kim Jin-cheol and Byul the film is an affecting experience. Jae-eun Jeong does not provide easy answers as to the direction the girls will take, but, by avoiding cynicism, she allows us to see their possibilities.

Though human-pulled rickshaws were invented in Japan at the end of the 19th century and were still operating in many Asian cities until the 1950s, they have come to symbolize the degradation that peasants suffered in early 20th century China. Pulling rickshaws was often the only work available to those coming to the cities for the first time, and many had to work 17 or 18 hours a day, regardless of the weather, just to eke out a living. Recently released on DVD in the Celebration of Chinese Cinema series, Rickshaw Boy (1982) tells the story of Xiangzi, a young peasant from the countryside who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing in the 1920s, trying to save enough money to buy his own vehicle. The first film from Communist China to open in an American theater, Rickshaw Boy is not just a story about rickshaw pullers, but about the ugliness of a city run by dueling warlords where many of the poor turned against each other for survival. While at times overly melodramatic, the film transcends its "socialist realism" limitations to become a deeply involving portrait of the optimism and courage of the common people in old China .

Xiangzi (Zhang Fengyi) struggles to establish a business, but is seduced by the owner of the Rickshaw Company's daughter, the crafty and manipulative but good-hearted Hunui, brilliantly performed by Siqin Gaowa. Despite a ten-year difference in age, she tires to lure him to the altar, but he runs away to work as a rickshaw puller for a scholar, Mr Cao (Li Tang). Huniu tracks him down and tries to trick him into marrying her by pretending to be pregnant. Xiangzi believes her and agrees to be married, resuming his quest to buy his own vehicle until battered by repeated tragedies. Desperate conditions of life in pre-Revolutionary China are shown in the growing relationship between Xiangzi and Xiao Fuzi (Yin Xin), a young woman who is forced into prostitution so that she can buy food to keep her young brothers alive.

Directed by Ling Zefing, a member of China 's Third Generation (1949-78) of filmmakers, Rickshaw Boy is based on the 1936 novel Camel Xiangzi by proletarian author and playwright Lao She, one of the first novels about a laborer in modern Chinese literature. The impact of Lao She (who sadly committed suicide after being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution) is still felt today. In recent years it has become common to see rickshaw boys dressed in traditional clothes worn by rickshaw pullers of the past, waiting for customers on the side of the road. Beijing residents call them "Xiangzi," celebrating the struggles of this hero from their literary past.

©2004 Howard Schumann
CineScene