South Korea – Bitch Flicks

Making Sure Female Friendship Films Aren’t Forgotten: ‘Take Care of My Cat’

The film is about the evolving friendships of five young South Korean women as they step away from their technical high school into a less certain world. Their degrees of closeness shift as they consider their futures in the face of particular restrictions in work and life opportunities due to gender and class discrimination.

This guest post by Adam Hartzell appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Before I knew about the Bechdel Test, I knew about Take Care of My Cat, the 2001 debut film by South Korean director Jeong Jae-eun that is a required text for those interested in New Korean Cinema.[i] Among the many admirable and compelling aspects of the film, I found it most compelling that it had almost nothing to do with boys.[ii] As film scholar Chi-Yun Shin put it, “These women are defined not by men but by themselves and with each other.”

Tae-hee, played by the incredible Bae Doo-na of The Host and Cloud Atlas, continues to work at her family’s sauna and is the hub of the friendship network. She does her best to keep everyone together. Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won) is the social climber, but she is not played for cliché. Her character–at risk of caricature–is provided more depth than is usual for someone of her type. Hye-joo’s closest friend in high school was Ji-young (Ok Ji-young). But Ji-young’s economic situation, living alone with her frail grandparents in a much poorer part of Incheon, results in limited employment options. She doesn’t have the money to keep up with Hye-joo’s status-seeking desires. She wants to go to art school, but her family lacks the funds to enable this pursuit. Then there are the Chinese-Korean identical twins, Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (played respectively by the Lee sisters, Eun-shil and Eun-ju). Their characters are less developed than the others, but their presence serves as acknowledgement of South Korea’s own specific multicultural make-up, something rarely acknowledged in the film industry at this time. Another character of interest here is the poet with cerebral palsy [iii] who dictates his poetry to Tae-hee. All these characters are, in their own ways, outsiders in relation to the growing South Korean economy only recently recovering from the IMF crisis.

Along with these characters, there is the cat that is passed between them. A stray that was found by Ji-young, it is given as a present to Hye-joo. When she returns this gift, it signifies rejection of their high school friendship that may no longer hold in their adult lives. The cat finds its way into the hands of all the women and represents an attempt to communicate what is unspoken between them. Jeong has said regarding her intent with the cat, “I had hoped for the girls to be like cats – flexible, independent, complex, to have the tendency to leave if they are not happy with their owner.”

In addition, mobile phones play a vibrant part in the communication, miscommunication, and refusal to communicate between the young women. Jeong displays the text on screen alongside the characters in an early creative effort to represent texting on film, of which South Korean cinema was an early pioneer. Finally, the gorgeous soundtrack works off the bleeps and tones of cellphones in its dreamy underscoring of this liminal period in the lives of these young women.

With the exception of the twins, each woman confronts discrimination directly. Ji-young does not have family or other connections necessary for the referrals required for certain jobs. Expectations are made by a male co-worker that Hye-joo should have laser vision corrective surgery. Tae-hee must deal with her father’s continued preference to her younger brother, leading to a confrontation with her father in a restaurant that includes a Korean literary reference. [iv] Explaining how Ji-young and Tae-hee fully resolve these forms of structural discrimination would result in my having to reveal plot points that I don’t want to reveal here. Let me just say that Tae-hee finds a connection with the temporary migrants in South Korea, Filipinos and Burmese, adding yet another layer to the feelings of isolation and exclusion these young women feel in the country of their birth.

Director Jeong Jae-eun has given us a wonderful exploration of female friendship through young women, whose position in their society is not stable. Allegiances shift as class rears a greater presence in their adult lives. As all great direction and scripts do, Jeong mostly shows rather than tells how these women connect and how they fail to connect. Early on in the historical prevalence of mobile technologies, Jeong demonstrates the myth in the promotional hype that such tools will keep us closer. She shows how they also keep us apart in how the tools are used and how class barriers limit access to such tools. Although it didn’t do spectacularly at the box office, Take Care of My Cat so touched its intended audience that it inspired an uprising of support to bring it back to theatres after being pulled sooner than fans wanted.

When New Korean Cinema emerged on the international film scene, part of what made it unique as a national film movement was the significant presence of not one, but three women directors. Along with Jeong, there was Lim Soon-rye and Byun Young-joo. Lim’s first two films were, interestingly, about male friendship (Three Friends and Waikiki Brothers). Lim would go on to direct a 2008 film partially about female friendship, a film based on a real-life South Korean women’s Olympic team handball squad called Forever the Moment. I think I can go on record and say it’s the greatest team handball film ever made. [v] Sports films in South Korea do not tend to do well, so it is a tremendous achievement that Lim garnered box office success for that film. Byun is most famous for her trilogy of documentaries on “Comfort Women,” which involve her friendship with women survivors and their own friendships with each other. Although Ardor and Flying Boys are less appreciated works, I am actually a fan of those feature films by Byun. Her most recent film, Helpless, actually garnered a best director from the industry. Back to Jeong–she moved on from Take Care of My Cat to a film partially about male friendship (The Aggressives). That film did not perform well at the box office and we had to wait seven years before Jeong took the director helm again, this time with critically well-received documentaries about architecture.

The reason I mention this women triumvirate of New Korean Cinema, besides pointing out how they all have directed films focusing on female friendship, is that in spite of their solid work and that of the women directors who joined them later, such as Park Chan-ok, Bang Eun-jin, and Gina Kim, I find myself discouraged that Jeong and other quality films by women directors, such as Kim’s excellent Invisible Light from 2003, often don’t make it on lists of significant films of the New Korean Cinema movement. Such lists are often dominated by the opposite of friendship, the male violence of films like Old Boy and I Saw The Devil.

Case in point: recently Indiewire, which on all other levels is a strong advocate of women’s films and focuses considerable coverage to pointing out gender discrimination in the U.S. film industry, posted a “primer” this summer on what they mislabeled as the “Korean New Wave.” (See the first endnote.) In that primer they completely dismiss the impact of women directors in South Korea. In their parenthetical excuse, they say they were only looking at films with “a measure of international distribution.” This is disingenuous since Take Care of My Cat received considerable international distribution for the time and Hong Sangsoo’s 2013 film Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, which made their list, has received almost next to nothing. [vi]

This erasure of women directors partly happens because we privilege the stories told by male directors, particularly those that are violent or action-oriented as Indiewire’s list of “essential” films demonstrates. Films about women’s lives where relationships are given precedence don’t fall into the male fight club preferences of many casual references to the South Korean film industry. Take Care of My Cat is a canonical text of New Korean Cinema. To leave it off your list is like leaving off Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder. Films about female friendship, the hard work of caring for others while negotiating room for independence, is just as much art, is just as engaging as, if not more than, watching a bunch of guys beat the crap out of each other. Ignoring films by the women of New Korean Cinema is part of a longer tradition of dismissing the women’s labor that makes art and entertainment possible. Take Care of My Cat’s erasure reminds us that we need to take care of our films and make sure that the exceptional works by these women aren’t forgotten or underappreciated. Such systematic forgetting makes it harder for the South Korean women working in the industry now and in the future to bring us their stories.

[i] Some writers have confused the “New Korean Cinema” and “Korean New Wave” film movements. For an example of this confusion, see Indiewire’s “10 Essential Films of the Korean New Wave” (June 26, 2014, credited to ‘The Playlist Staff’) where none of the films listed are part of the Korean New Wave but are actually part of New Korean Cinema. In the scholarly literature “Korean New Wave” denotes certain films made in the 1980s to the mid-90s that first started to address the cultural suppression and censorship at that time in South Korea’s history and were closely connected to the democracy movement. “New Korean Cinema” began in the late 1990s when censorship laws loosened and higher production quality became available. Then another confusing moniker entered the picture, “Hallyu,” which refers to the global pop culture phenomenon of South Korea films, television dramas, and pop music. The launching of the film segment of “Hallyu” began with Shiri (1999) by Kang Je-gyu. Mistakes in naming the wrong movement are primarily due to the names not being distinct enough. The fact that they both have “New” in them doesn’t help. Add to this that Hallyu means “wave” and you can see why Indiewire and others might mix up the movements and their origins. There are several books one can read to clarify this confusion, see for example Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer’s New Korean Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), Darcy Paquet’s New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Wave (Wallflower Press, 2010) and Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (ed. Colette Balmain, Intellect Ltd., 2013).

[ii] There is a young man who conveys romantic interest toward one of our characters, Hye-joo. Hye-joo brushes him off. But her romantic refusal is not “punished” or seen as her core flaw. Her friends are more upset with her general rudeness to him rather than any gender expectation that she should find the right man quickly or else she’ll regret it.

[iii] This character is played by an actor of similar embodiment, which is still rare casting for any national film industry.

[iv] The literary reference is to a novella by Cho Se-hui, the title of which goes by a few translation variations but I will use this one – A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf. It’s a bit of a plot spoiler to mention the actual dialogue so I won’t here.

[v] If anyone knows of another team handball film, I seriously would love to know since sports films are one of my other film interests.

[vi] I am assuming by “international distribution” the authors mean what most folks intend by that phrase, distribution outside of film festivals.

Adam Hartzell has been a contributing writer to Koreanfilm.org since 2000. He has written for various websites (Fandor, sf360, VCinemaShow), the quarterly Kyoto Journal, and has a chapter in The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press) along with contributions in Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (Intellect Ltd). He writes often about the films of Hong Sangsoo such as for a retrospective of his work held in San Francisco and a paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle in 2014.

A ‘Sunny’ South Korean Song for Sisterhood

… Kang seems to be a strong advocate for feminism in film. Though South Korea cinema (and the country as a whole) clearly needs far more women in off-screen positions of power, Sunny seems like a small but hopeful step towards equality, and may well inspire girls in today’s high school cliques to one day demand those positions.

This guest post by Ben Cowburn appears as part of our theme week on Male Feminists and Allies.

Despite the recent election of the country’s first female president, South Korea isn’t the easiest place to find examples of gender equality. The country has one of the world’s largest gender gaps (1), a corporate culture still shaped by patriarchal Confucian traditions, and extreme pressure on young women to conform to very particular beauty standards. At first glance, Korean cinema appears to mirror this lack of progressiveness, as in terms of behind-the-camera power, the country’s film industry, which boomed with the Korean Wave of the late 90s, seems to be as much a boys’ club as Hollywood (2). However, the situation for on-screen representations of women and girls seems to be steadily improving in South Korea, driven in part by successful filmmakers who could easily be described as male feminists.

Korea’s most internationally visible writer/directors Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, and festival favourite Lee Chang-dong, have all crafted films based around female characters at least as complex as the men they come into conflict with. Park’s Lady Vengeance gave Lee Yeong-ae a role as starkly uncompromising as Choi Min-shik’s in Oldboy, and his films I’m A Cyborg but it’s Okay and Stoker both feature female protagonists. Bong’s film Mother is based around a searing performance from celebrated TV actor Kim Hye-ja, and even the seemingly male-dominated Snowpiercer features strong roles for Ko Ah-sung, Octavia Spencer, Alison Pill and Tilda Swinton, who gives one of her most memorably strange performances. Lee’s Secret Sunshine and Poetry feature complex, unglamorous, down-to-earth female protagonists, portrayed in award-winning fashion by Jeon Do-yeon and Yun Jeong-hie.

In the less internationally prestigious corners of the industry, South Korean cinema has developed a crowd-pleasing line in modestly budgeted films with predominantly female ensemble casts. Though often determinedly formulaic, films such as Forever the Moment, based on a women’s handball team, and Harmony (3), set in a women’s prison, are relentlessly entertaining, easily pass both Bechdel and Maki Mori tests, and have proved very popular. The most commercially successful example of this mini-genre is Sunny, released in 2011, and directed by Kang Hyeong-Cheol, who co-wrote the script with Lee Byeong-Heon (4). Both Kang and Lee are men, but Kang reportedly based the story on his mother’s recollections of her high-school life (5), and the film, which is powered by the memorable performances and excellent chemistry of its largely female cast, has a strongly feminist message.

Sunny centres around a clique of seven friends in a Seoul girls’ high school sometime in the 1980s (the film is a little hazy with the actual continuity), who are reunited in the present day, after being estranged for more than 25 years. The film is structured to give equal weight to the friends’ time in high school and to their eventual reunion, and cheerfully ticks off most of the tropes viewers would expect from its set-up. In the high school scenes friendships are forged, sisterhood is strained, bullies are bested, cute guys are crushed on, and families are fought with. In the present day, nostalgic jokes and reveries are shared, disappointments and failures are revealed, and the bonds of friendship are shown to be timeless. All pleasantly predictable and satisfying for fans of coming-of-age stories, and elevated by the playful zest of the film-making, entertaining plot absurdities, and most of all, by the irresistible energy of the cast.

The cast of Sunny’s 80s (left) and present-day scenes (right). — The cast of *Sunny*’s 80s (left) and present-day scenes (right).

The film is told from the perspective of Na-mi, a newcomer to the school in the 80s, and an under-appreciated wife and mother in 2011. A chance present-day encounter with old friend Chun-hwa leads Na-mi into a series of flashbacks, and sparks an attempt to get the old gang back together. Gang is the right word, as in the flashbacks we see the seven girls trade insults, and eventually punches and flying kicks, with a rival posse from another school. Chun-hwa, the group’s charismatic leader, brings Na-mi into the fold when she proves useful in squaring off against the enemy. Despite some friction (there has to be some friction) with another member, Na-mi is soon initiated into the group, which is given the name Sunny by a radio DJ, and practising a chaotic dance routine to accompany Boney-M’s version of Bobby Hebb’s ode to looking on the bright side.

The 80s scenes are a blur of logo-strewn sports bags, candy-coloured sweaters, synthed-up disco tunes and reverb-heavy ballads. The script mixes in references to current K-pop groups, as well as winking predictions for a future of professional video gamers and “portable phones.” Anachronisms are also cheerfully thrown around: characters mention watching MTV, which wasn’t broadcast in Korea until 1991, and the story plays out against a backdrop of civil unrest, which seems to suggest the student-led June Democracy Movement that flared up in 1980. This turbulent background seems to mainly be set up to allow for a highly entertaining slow-motion fight between the two gangs amidst a melee of riot police and protesters. The ridiculous bravado of the scene, which is clearly filtered through the older characters’ memories of the fight, makes the clunky exposition and obvious expense of the extra-strewn scene completely worthwhile.

The heightened, highly-charged nature of the flashback scenes reflects Na-mi’s nostalgic (and sometimes painful) recollections of her school days, and contrasts nicely with the slightly more subdued style of the present day scenes. At times, the two time periods are swirled together, as in another deliriously weird fight sequence, and in a touching montage in which Na-mi’s teenage disappointment over an unrequited crush is cross-cut with her mid-40s acceptance of a path not taken. Mostly, though, the streams are crossed with playful in-camera transitions, which employ doorways, walls, and windows as time portals, and music as a bridge between periods. A pivotal (and probably obligatory) scene in which Na-mi watches a video recording of the teenage gang members addressing their older selves is adeptly realized, thanks to the vitality of the girls’ ensemble work, and the weaving of on-going conflicts into the video.

There are few scenes in the 80s storyline in which Na-mi doesn’t face an elemental teenage challenge, either from within the gang or from the outside world, and this helps sustain a charged and immediate atmosphere. Though the present-day scenes aren’t quite as potent, they provide plenty of opportunities to underline the important role the girls played in each other’s formative years, and what they have missed out on since high school. The easy, affectionate chemistry between the older actors nicely mirrors the frenetic fellowship of the younger cast, and the present-day scenes deliver plenty of abrasive humour to complement dollops of well-earned sentiment.

Na-mi and Chun-hwa in a present-day scene.

The actors in both story-lines brilliantly unify their linked performances, and this was clearly a major focus of the casting and Kang’s work with his cast. Particularly compelling are Sim Eun-kyeong and Yu Ho-jeong as the younger and older Na-mi, and Kang So-ra and Jin Hee-kyung as Chun-hwa, but each member of the gang is sharply defined, especially in the 80s scenes. The characterisation is mostly archetypal, but the girls are all shown to be witty, smart and determined, and no one is bodily humiliated or slut-shamed. In fact, sexuality has only the briefest of roles in proceedings, which is perhaps a little unrealistic, but helps to keep the focus firmly on the friendship between the girls. The single romantic complication is swiftly dealt with, so that the gang can get on with the real business of practising their dance moves, kicking ass and keeping the world at bay with a combination of mutual support and bag language.

Swearing plays a surprisingly important role in the film. Early on Na-mi’s possibly senile grandmother spews out a stream of backwoods invective, which Na-mi later copies to help the gang scare off their rivals and gain acceptance. In both time periods, the friends routinely refer to each other as ‘shibal nyun’ (usually translated as ‘fucking bitch’), and one of the younger gang members dreams of writing a swearing dictionary. The film’s original cut had so much cursing that it to be edited to ensure a PG-15 certificate, which seems to have been the right choice, as the film presents some very positive messages for teenage girls. The director’s cut restores the characters to their full, foul-mouthed glory, which gives scenes in the past and present bite and authenticity, and could be seen as a challenge to the subservient role women are often still tacitly expected to perform in Korean society. Other satirical touches include digs at South Korea’s enduring obsession with very specific beauty ideals, such as “double eyelids,” and the undermining of a male teacher’s army-derived methods of corporal punishment.

The Sunny girls face off against a rival gang.

The teenage characters have a refreshingly diverse range of ambitions (most of which remain unfulfilled in their present day lives, of course), and they are never objectified or marginalised, with costume design and shot choice underlying another important theme: that each of the girls needs to become the protagonist in her own story. This is somewhat unnecessarily spelled out out at several points, but the film mostly follows through with the idea, only fudging things a little in its final scene, which seems to present money as a key to solve everyone’s problems. More importantly, though, the resolution shows the women learning to take inspiration from their teenage selves, and vowing to reclaim agency in their lives.

Although seemingly machine-tooled to yield maximum comic and emotional impact, Sunny has plenty of rough edges and plot contrivances: Na-mi’s husband is mysteriously called away on a two-moth-long business trip, to give her more time to bond with her estranged friends, and the climactic event that closes the 80s storyline doesn’t convince as a reason for the girls to completely lose touch for a quarter century. The director’s cut, which I watched, could certainly use a trim, with a few unnecessary side stories adding little to the main characters’ arcs. None of this really matters, though, as Kang and his cast manage to cram in plenty of heady scenes of triumph, defeat, affection and antagonism into the 80s storyline, most of which are paid off in the present-day scenes. Do the 40-something friends reunite to perform the dance to Sunny they practised as teenagers? Does each woman find solace and strength in her re-invigorated friendships? Does the dictionary of swearing ever get written? I couldn’t possibly say.

Sunny proved endearingly popular on its cinema release (6), and became the second highest grossing domestic film in Korea of 2011, due in part to a surge in nostalgia for the culture of the 7080 generation, but mainly to strong word-of-mouth. As with Bridesmaids and The Heat, the film clearly shows the huge demand for female-lead films, and like those film’s director, Paul Feig, Kang seems to be a strong advocate for feminism in film. Though South Korea cinema (and the country as a whole) clearly needs far more women in off-screen positions of power, Sunny seems like a small but hopeful step towards equality, and may well inspire girls in today’s high school cliques to one day demand those positions.

1 – South Korea currently ranks number 111 out of 136 in the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report, and the country has been on a downwards trajectory for the last few years.

2 – All of 50 most popular Korean films to date have male directors.

3 – One of the most successful Korean films with a female director, Dae-gyu Kang, Harmonymade me weep repeatedly when I saw it on a plane a few years ago. I blame the altitude.

4 – Not the devilishly handsome actor of the same name, best known to international audiences from The Good, The Bad and The Weird.

5 – According to a Q+A transcribed here.

6 – The film opened at number in the Korean box office, stayed there the following week, and returned to the top spot five weeks later.

Ben Cowburn is from England, and currently works as an English language teacher in Jinju, South Korea. He also writes and takes photos. Words and pictures, can be found at: thelightthroughthewindow.tumblr.com.