I wasn't prepared for how sad this film would be.The world still ignores women's pain until they fear it. We still aren't believed, even when we want to talk about it, to our loved ones, to our doctors. It's hysteria. We're too sensitive. It makes us angry, and righteously so, but we learn to denounce that rage and cage it up, keep it confined to the shadows. Irena just wants to belong. She wants to have a normal, happy life, but she struggles with something inside of her that she can't control. Cat People lives in a space of psychosexual terror, where the fantastical is explicitly stated and everyday despair is only a suggestion, but it's the tiptoeing whispers that we believe, not the desperate calls for help. She is belittled, gossipped about, and abandoned by a man that claimed to love her, but never even knew her. I'm always drawn to tragic women like that. I always side with the vengeful, the witches and the monstrous and the cat people. Irena deserved better than what she got, an ending as clear as day, and abrupt as a night bus screeching to a halt.
