JUNe 18, 2024
What do you do when someone important calls you? Do you answer? Do you hang up? What if that call is the last chance to talk to that person forever? Lucas Stark asks and answers all of these questions in ‘Coping Ugly’, a short film that deals with a heartbreaking pain in the most sensitive way possible, without going rogue and ruining the whole mood.
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Devan, the main and only character, rejects all the calls whilst being out in the sun taking pictures. His phone rings like crazy but he is not answering the calls. When he does, he finds out that something bad had happened, and he has to do something towards this. But, as in Herman Melville’s story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ he is not taking any action; he is contemplating, he is meditating about this, he is overwhelmed by the situation and doesn’t know how to deal with it.
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Review written by Vlad A.G
Devan is the character who knows how destiny works and does nothing to change it. He is looking at the actions happening around him and takes them as they are, without interfering, without feeling obligated to change the course of the narrative.
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Of course, this short can be interpreted in many ways, but for us, there are only two possibilities: the first one is the literal one, where the main character feels angry and betrayed, has his own problems with his father and refuses to go and change the whole complicated situation, and the other is the more philosophical one, where the character is the observer who knows how the world is changing, sees the differences, the problems, the outside influences, but does nothing to affect them, it’s just the scrivener that takes notes, watches the world going round and round, and waits for the right moment to shout: “stop the world, I want to get down!”
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An interesting film with an intriguing premise!