Take Care of My Cat

Five young women who met and bonded as classmates in an Incheon high school face adulthood. When the upwardly mobile Hae-Joo (Lee Yoo-Won) ups sticks and heads for Seoul, making clear that she feels a need to distance herself from her socially inferior past - and friends - the other four are left to take stock. A new bond forms between the romantic dreamer Tae-Hee (Bae) and the arty Ji-Young (Ok), and both start to think about going abroad to study. Jung's debut feature (her short films have won prizes at the Korean festivals) is kaleidoscopic in structure and deliberately light on plot, and it offers a likeably informal group portrait of its 20-year-old protagonists. But little here is as 'realist' or credible as it first appears (least of all the virtual absence of sexual feelings and impulses), and the film ultimately seems no less far-fetched than the male fantasies about women (the abominable Girls' Night Out, written and directed by Im Sang-Soo, comes to mind) that it implicitly criticises. Snazzy title-design, though.