The Kicks That Life Gives Us for Better or Worse
In the 19 films of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival’s main competition, the most frequently recurring themes were motherhood, family and community as well as romantic relationships with an age gap. On a deeper level many narratives evoked the question of how we as individuals can find our place in life when faced with obstacles based on unjust societal structures. Protagonists found themselves stressed because they had to care for the ones in need, they longed for their loved ones who moved away, or they recognized their position of power over others. Sometimes they fought for a better community life or they just had their own well-being in mind.
One film that made a strong impression on its audience by drawing them intensely into the inner world of its main character is Mary Bronstein’s second feature film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
When Linda comes home with her daughter one day, a large, seemingly endless hole opens up in the apartment, making it uninhabitable from one moment to the next. The two move into a motel, from which Linda manages her job as a therapist, the treatment program of her daughter, who suffers from an unnamed physical disorder, her own therapy sessions and the construction site in her house. She only communicates with her partner by phone. He may be physically absent but his voice (Christian Slater) nevertheless has a powerful presence.
Rose Byrne’s performance as Linda coins a disturbing, bizarre film that evokes the feeling of being visually and emotionally close to the main character, at times very and almost too close, while her daughter is only audible but not fully visible for most of the plot. With her second feature film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein takes us into the demanding everyday life of a mother whose life is increasingly falling apart.
Although we don’t see the nameless child, together with Linda we hear everything it says. Demands pour in on Linda from all sides. Every day, she has to drop her daughter off at the child treatment program, whose head (played by Mary Bronstein herself) repeatedly reminds her that her little one needs to reach the goal of gaining a certain amount of weight more quickly. Nutrition flows through a tube into her body and lets her stay away from school.
Linda follows the instructions, yet is also distracted by the other things going on in her private and professional life. Her own patients demand more attention than she expected or simply more than they paid for: One is obviously attracted to her, another, a distraught mother, suddenly leaves not only the session but also her baby on the couch. “I’m not a mother,” she says shortly beforehand to make clear that her new everyday life, in which her partner does not take on any of the care work, is overwhelming her, stressed her out.
Linda is also constantly expected to be the ‘perfect’ mother, juggling everything on her own without complaining. In the motel, she spends her time in a confined space with her daughter, where sometimes she just feels the need to get some air, or a bottle of wine, or to check on the never-ending building site. Linda knows her partner would be judgmental and therefore lies to him claiming that babysitter James (A$AP Rocky) is keeping an eye on her sleeping daughter while she wanders through the night. Instead, she surfs the dark web with James – one of the few moments when Linda is not primarily exposed to stress or exhaustion.
In an interview Bronstein explained that the feeling of fear and pressure that accompanies a parent of a sick child was crucial to developing the story. The reason for the decision to barely show the child also seems to be that she wanted to focus even more on Linda. What form the illness takes is not relevant to the plot, as it is about the emotional attention it demands from the caregiver.
Although Linda herself visits a therapist, namely her colleague at the end of the corridor, these sessions have a rather counterproductive effect, as the professional closeness crosses boundaries and prevents a productive atmosphere for conversation. In her desperation, Linda crosses several boundaries that are only suitable as solutions for the moment, but usually entail all the more protracted consequences. For example, she promises to get her daughter a hamster so that she can go to the children’s center alone because Linda can’t find a parking space: the beginning of a series of upsetting events on the subsequent drive back to the motel. Such scenes illustrate how supposedly small moments can turn into major struggles in everyday parent-child life.
The powerful pull of the narration makes it impossible for us as an audience to not feel with Linda, her stress is passed on to us. We gaze with Linda into the world, we get to be part of her world. A world that is threatened by an endless hole that represents its dark sides, a darkness that no gaze can get fixed on but can only lose itself in infinity. Is there a way out? The more days she spends in the motel, the more Linda wants to disappear into the black hole. It gapes monstrously in the ceiling and represents her inner state. The hole in her child’s stomach also seems to contain endless universes of dark soulscapes. How can we fill the inner holes that open up when we need help and are at the end of our tether, asks If I Had Legs I’d Kick You indirectly. How can their pull be stopped and how can this end for Linda and her daughter?
Bianca Jasmina Rauch
©FIPRESCI