From Omeleto.
Two friends buy a hula hoop.
HULA HOOP is used with permission from Katie Ivey. Learn more at https://instagram.com/glasstablefilmco.
Sophie and Brooke are two women hanging out at home, bored and listless. To break the monotony of everyday life, Brooke impulsively buys two hula hoops, much to Sophie’s skepticism.
Brooke is enthusiastic about her new purchase and eventually draws Sophie into a backyard hula-hooping session. At first, their playing is awkward. But as they lose their grown-up self-consciousness, they slowly get into the game, their shared laughter and nostalgia helping them to form a deeper bond.
Directed by Katie Ivey from a script co-written with Geanna Funes, David Washell and Alec Beard, this charming comedy short captures the joy and importance of our inner child. By turns deadpan and delicate in its storytelling, it achieves a tone that is both somber and whimsical, mirroring the journey that the main characters make from ennui to enlivenment.
The film begins in a kind of stasis, with its two heroines laid out on a sofa in a state of lethargy. Lacking motivation, they sit side by side in silence, glued to their devices. It’s a risk to begin a film with an evocation of boredom and the sparse, deadpan dialogue or action that comes with it, but its strikingly offbeat visuals and a slightly off-kilter rhythm in the editing evoke the sense that something more is happening under the surface.
When Brooke breaks out the hula hoop, the differences between the friends come to the fore, adding some push-pull tension and pulling both characters outside their bubble. Their dialogue melts into a more naturalistic register as they slowly relax into playing with the hoop, a transition nicely accomplished by actors Estef Martin and Maddie Compton as Brooke and Sophie. They tap into a spirit that’s between childhood and adulthood, suffused with nostalgia. They lose their ennui and become more energized as they do tricks and make one another laugh, which leads to memories and revelations that lead to deeper, more fulfilling connection.
Idiosyncratic, distinctive and an ode to the inner child, HULA HOOP’s quirkiness becomes oddly poetic by the film’s end, as Brooke and Sophie brighten and experience a childlike joy again together. The film’s whimsicality could be mistaken as slight, but with its satisfying conclusion, it achieves a winsome wholesomeness. It captures how the simple innocence of play and fun helps us rediscover the light-heartedness of being young again — and how such a tonic to the spirits is never as far away as it can sometimes feel.
