Hot Docs 2009: Cat Ladies

Cat Ladies (Christie Callan-Jones)
BY MATHEW KUMAR

Cat Ladies doesn’t start particularly well—with a trite series of talking heads discussing their “comical” image of a cat lady—and it doesn’t end particularly well either, more or less just petering out as if there’s nothing left to say. But that’s patently not true, as the middle bit of this hour-long documentary—which concentrates specifically on the stories of four “cat ladies”—offers a lot to consider. Though there are plenty of moments where the cat ladies set themselves up to be laughed at, the film wisely asks us to consider the compulsion to collect cats as we would any addiction, with meaningful forays into each cat lady’s past and the role the cats play in their lives. Indeed there are moments of real tragedy here, from the lady who can’t stop herself “saving” feral cats even though she knows she is ruining her life, to the lady who would unrepentantly “save” hundreds more in a display of staggering delusion. There are many wider issues that go untouched—for example, the mere idea of cats (traditionally aloof, uncaring) as an object of fixation for the lonely, but the issues which are discussed in this documentary’s short running time are touched on with sensitivity and intelligence. 3.5/5