A CAT'S LIFE - Mark Reviews Movies

A Cat's Life, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

At its heart, A Cat's Life is about a little girl learning that change is inevitable and that letting go is an essential part of accepting that fact. It's mainly about a cute cat, though, doing the things that cats do and getting into some peril. There's an argument to be made that watching such feline frolicking is a pleasant endeavor and worrying about the kitty is properly suspenseful, but at a certain point, the cat story and the human one start to feel as if each is getting in the way of the other.

Since it's technically the main character here, we'll start with the cat, which comes to be named Lou and has a fairly tragic back story that plays out in fairly shocking detail—considering the movie's happy-go-lucky tone for a while—at the start. Lou and its siblings are being cared for by their mother in the attic of a Paris apartment building. Lou is the most curious of the litter, jumping up assorted pieces of furniture and following its mother to the roof, where the kitten slips and almost falls.

Mom saves Lou just in time, giving it a look of scolding disappointment that's borderline anthropomorphic, before heading back to the rooftop. Chasing a rat across gutters and pieces of pipe, the mother, though, can't save itself when it slips. An overhead shot looking down toward the ground is thankfully wide enough and far enough away that we can't see the result, and yes, kids movies have a long history of including such parental deaths. This one's so random and sudden that it feels more like plot-based cruelty than an actual moment of tragedy.

Things quickly cheer up, though, when a young girl named Clémence (Capucine Sainson-Fabresse) and her friend, who have been keeping tabs on the cat family, realize the mother is missing. The friend takes most of the kittens, and Clémence claims Lou. The girl's mother Isa (Lucie Laurent) isn't happy about the idea of having a pet in the apartment, but her father Fred (Nicolas Casar-Umbdenstock) can't refuse his daughter's pleading. The sting of the disagreement between the parents goes deeper than loving bickering, and sure enough, Clémence spends her nights in her room listening to them arguing about who knows what.

Anyway, the cat is, indeed, cute. It spends its days wandering around the apartment, climbing and pawing at whatever it can, and stalking a pigeon sitting outside the window, before realizing there's a gang of the birds perched there. It runs out the front door of the apartment on one occasion, until it reaches the sidewalk and sees the hustling bustle of the big city. Lou isn't the kind of cat, apparently, that likes to be cooped up with, played with, and tended to by humans, so when Clémence and her parents take a trip to their country cottage, the cat spends its time roaming the forest, exploring a local junkyard, and hanging out with another kitten.

The screenplay by director Guillaume Maidatchevsky and Michaël Souhaité (adapted from a novel by Maurice Genevoix) gives the girl and the cat about equal weight in terms of the narrative, although the actual weight of both is pretty light. Clémence's parents separate, leading the girl to despair that her family has broken and she can't do anything about it.

A return to the cottage to pack up things before selling it leads Lou to run off into the woods, where it can be free to do whatever it wants. Clémence desperately wants to find her cat, but her animal-friendly neighbor Madeleine (Corinne Masiero) tries to explain that Lou is no longer her cat, if such a curious creature ever could have been hers in the first place.

There's pragmatism, and there's tough love. Then, there's whatever attitude this movie comes to have about animals in general and pets specifically, which kind of puts a damper on all the fun of Lou scampering around assorted places. The forest is a harsh environment for a cat, filled with predators, feral felines that don't appreciate having their territory intruded upon, and dangerous obstacles left behind by humans. It's a strange bit of cognitive dissonance here, watching the cat endure so much danger in the wild and hearing the repeated sentiment that Clémence, a little girl who's worried her beloved pet is in danger, should just give up on the cat.

Obviously, a story about this idea could work, but it simply doesn't in this case, because the filmmakers so thoroughly exploit making us feel something for this cat by way of its sad story, the constant scenes of it either having fun or being put in jeopardy, and how much it means to this lonely girl. The tonal and thematic shifts of A Cat's Life are so abrupt and drastic that they feel unfair—not only because the movie is too thin and shallow in its aims to pull off the change, but also because, well, it's just sort of mean to make us care about something and try to convince us we're wrong for having done so in the first place.

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