...und jeder sucht sein Kätzchen

This film is listed as "When The Cat's Away." You will like

the characters in this film. They are all good people intent

on living their lives and interacting with each other in

meaningful ways. You may not agree with their lifesyles,

but you will not dislike them. I found the elderly ladies very

interesting especially with regard to their interaction with

the young woman (Chloe) who is the main character. The

story evolves around the loss of Chloe's beloved cat, Gris-Gris ("Gray-Gray"). This is a film that will absorb you

as you admire the human warmth and pure honesty of everyone involved in Chloe's life.

A few days in the life of a young woman framed by the search for her missing pet. I was charmed.

A peculiar depiction of Paris. The more ambiguous, the more interesting. No Eiffel Tower, No 'Musée Du Louvre', no 'lost in translation' tourists. Just life, life at its fullest. In a controversial neighbourhood of the 20th 'arrondissement' there is more to life than commercial Paris. Life lies here in graffiti, in demolition of buildings, in bars, in the inevitable gossip.

Chloé is our vehicle of discovering that exploring life leads to identity. The camera follows her around and illustrates the most banal daily routines. The film doesn't need special effects to captivate you; it replaces them with people dealing with absurdly normal situations. From recurring scenes of amnesic old ladies being brought back by the police to characters running after cats on the roof of a building, Cédric Klapisch transforms the trivial into something exciting. All characters are expected to develop their identity and reach a common ground with the society and with themselves. Just as lost things are frequently lying in front of us, their search is ephemeral.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable film, with a very interesting use of editing in parts... The film's main character, Chloe, lives with her gay flatmate, Michel, has few friends, and definitely no love life to speak of. She works as a make up artist, a job which she hates. One day, Chloe goes away on holiday, and leaves her cat with the local cat lady, Mme Renoir. Upon returning home, Chloe's cat, Gris-Gris, has disappeared. So starts a search for Gris-Gris that the whole neighbourhood is involved in. We are taken on a journey through a district of Paris quite distinct from any glamorised Hollywood image you'll ever see. This is the real, working, living Paris, with real people living in it, and this particular area is in a phase of 'urban development', with a lot of the traditional, working class aspects of the community being pushed aside to make way for the progress of bourgeois trends. We meet a whole host of this area's inhabitants along the way, each with their own eccentricities and foibles; characters that soon become part of Chloe's life. The disappearance of the cat instigates Chloe's search into her own life, to fill the gaps that are missing. This film centres around the hopes and desires of one character in particular (Chloe), but the backdrop is a vessel for expressing changes that are affecting real people in Paris. An interesting, arty approach to a film about the search to find oneself, and come to terms with an ever changing world that one may feel at odds with.

Much preferable to Klapisch's follow-up, the stagebound UN AIR DE FAMILLE, this film still visualises the traumatic labyrinth of its heroine as she tries to escape her diffident personality, her rotten luck with men and the bewildering changes to her beloved Paris. Klapisch isn't above using his cat metaphor scatalogically as well as philosophically, but the detective search for enlightenment gives the plot a badly needed momentum the second film lacks.

Rohmeresque, it's been called, and you can see the point in the reliance on dialogue, young protagonists, irony and colour-coding, if not the elder's overarching critical intelligence. CHACUN achieves an empathy with its heroine the Master might envy.