Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat is a bittersweet tale of girlhood friends growing apart, told with visual inventiveness. It's slow-paced, but thoughtful, enlivened by Jeong's panache with the images, and how she connects those images with her insight into the technology-dependent world of her protagonists. As these young women send and receive messages on their pagers, the text blips out across the movie screen. It may seem like a minor touch, but it explicates a ubiquitous aspect of modern Korean life, while also slyly bringing the viewer deeper into the characters' world. In another clever touch that rings true, the women also use cell phones for nonverbal communication, taking great care in selecting the tunes the phones will play when they ring, and even joining forces to play a birthday song with their phones for Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won). The young cast is uniformly good, with Bae Doo-na (as the sweet-natured Tae-hee) especially charming. The script sympathetically captures the particular frustrations of being a certain age, without means, and of not quite knowing what direction to go in. Jeong's skill with character is exemplified by Hae-joo, a shallow striver who stops short of being a caricature. Ironically, it's not when she's among her friends, but when the ambitious girl is suffering the indignities of her hostile workplace that she generates the most sympathy. The images of cinematographer Choi Young-hwan are spellbinding, even when the narrative is not. The flashes of color in the girls' wardrobes stand out against the dull gray backgrounds of the depressed city of Inchon, and the bleach bypass processing of the film brings out this contrast gorgeously. The story veers dangerously close to melodrama toward the end, but it's kept afloat by the filmmaker's cool observational wit, and her genuine empathy for her heroines.