I recently watched an Irish series named Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope on Netflix and thought about it for almost a week. The skeleton of the show can be compared to the British series Fleabag ; however, the situations, and the mood it is set in, are diametrically different. Creator Stefanie Preissner makes excellent commentaries on contemporary female friendships here. The protagonists – Aisling (Seána Kerslake) and Danielle (Danika McGuigan, who passed away two months ago due to cancer) – are twenty-somethings who live together in Dublin. While the former works in finance, the latter struggles to keep her head up amidst the pressures she faces in the world as an art student.
They’re both pretty good at what they do; so, that’s not the problem. They party all night and wake up with headaches regularly; they seem to chase after invisible rainbows every day. The key takeaway, for me, apart from the unlimited conversations and reconciliations amongst women, is that Aisling feels like a victim even when she’s involved in her own downfall. She’s the kind of person who wouldn’t apologize, or admit that she’s made mistakes, unless confronted with theoretical evidence.
Is that how most of us behave? Do we present our stories of misery and tragedy without illustrating the full picture to the people that enter our lives later? In Sasi’s Tamil film, Sivappu Manjal Pachai , Madhan (G. V. Prakash Kumar) doesn’t want his older sister, Raji (Lijomol Jose) to get married to the traffic cop (Raj, played by Siddharth), as he had been humiliated by him. Madhan is angry at Raj for making him wear a nightie and dragging him to the police station for zooming through the city’s streets.
20bgfr_Can't Cope Won't Cope - 3
Madhan is a traffic racer who doesn’t give a second thought to the plight of the commuters and pedestrians. He isn’t really sorry for riding his motorcycle over the speed limit. All he’s worried about is a YouTube video which has gone viral – he’s seen in a nightie in it. He thinks it’ll affect his macho image (his rivals do pass comments and taunt him), but he doesn’t ever take a step back to realize the damage he’s caused. Even while forcing Raji to cut off ties with Raj, he harps on his internal turmoil alone and never on why he got arrested in the first place. Finally, when Raji, upon hearing the facts, chooses to marry Raj anyway, Madhan decides to not attend her wedding.
It doesn’t matter whether Madhan and Raji grew up together. It doesn’t matter whether they depended on each other through thick and thin for more than two decades, as they didn’t have their parents to fall back on. Heck, Madhan will do whatever it takes to stay away from his brother-in-law; but if he gets a chance to mock him, though, he won’t let it go to waste.
That way, Madhan and Aisling are like two peas in a pod. They’re not blissfully unaware of their actions; they’re just not ready to face the consequences. Danielle doesn’t tell Aisling about any of these things. She just walks away from her best friend due to the latter’s tryst with alcoholism (in the first season) and not because of the issues I pointed at. I have put Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope under a different light to tell you about Madhan’s flaws, too.
If I have to write about Aisling’s thought process, I’ll have to bring up this line, “I am so good at getting people to do things that they do not wanna do!” This dialogue, which she utters in the last episode of the second season, eruditely sums up her personality.
For Aisling, it’s another feather in her hat – an achievement even. But for the person at the receiving end, it’ll definitely come across as annoying. Who’d want to do something that they’re vehemently uninterested in? I guess, folks like Aisling and Madhan haven’t heard of the mantra called karma, or the proverb, “What goes around comes around!”
