Working Girls

It starts off like a Hiroshi Shimizu title: Korean Girls at the Harbor. Five best friends, at the peak of their high school years and without a care in the world, prance merrily ‘round the waterfront, sing and dance to some silly song, take pictures for mementos, scream and giggle uncontrollably, without a care in the world. It’s the epitome of friendship, an intimate togetherness between the five girls that the rest of the film will endeavor to replicate but never truly fulfill.

This brief flashback that opens Take Care of My Cat washes out into the mundane present day. As if to jolt us into these contemporary times, the first thing we suddenly see is someone shattering an apartment window, whilst down below one of the girls, now out of high school, goes off on her morning commute to faraway Seoul. In this film, none of the main characters own a car, so going from one place to another, whether for work or leisure, means bus rides, trains, and long walks, together with the exhaustion that is attendant with everyday commuting (how refreshing it is to see a film that acknowledges the fact that private transportation remains a luxury for a minority while the rest of society queues for the next ride back home). More importantly, the manner in which these characters are classified and restricted to particular social options, as well as their relations and interactions with one another, is mainly predicated on their work. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), living with her grandparents in the slums near the harbor, boasts the unique talent for creating textiles, a skill set that sadly has no place in the money economy as evinced by her unemployment. The two twins Bir-yu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eung-ju), as their chief source of income, sell trinkets on the streets. Upwardly mobile Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won), working at a brokerage firm in Seoul, uses her charm and charisma to climb up the corporate ladder in a job she’s terribly underqualified for. Meanwhile, Tae-hee (Bae Doona, the greatest actress of our times) helps run her family’s spa, even though she’s not earning anything from it. The ever-growing working hours, the encroachment of labor time into leisure, the constant fear of being without a job in tandem with the precarity of work itself --- no matter how many times these girls reunite, it is tragically inevitable that work, the means to simply survive, will ultimately tear this group apart.

What moved me in this film is its encapsulation of a moment in young adulthood when all that matters, hopefully for the time being, is to make ends meet, even if we unavoidably risk losing what is most important: our hopes, our dreams, our friends. There is a restlessness that is felt here, a quiet desperation at the way this present world is being run, something it shares with Yasujiro Ozu’s salaryman films. It’s this desperation, call it anger if you want, that is more precious than gold, because cinema, in the words of Pedro Costa, is supposed to “make us feel that something isn’t right”.