All the rage: The shocking new Rose Byrne film that tackles the mother load
The camera sits tight – really tight – on her flawless face, tracking every twitch, grimace, scowl and frown as Linda, a therapist and the mother of a very sick child, descends into a psychological hell from which she can see no escape.
It's called motherhood.
'What I wanted to do was something I have never seen before,' says the movie's American writer-director, Mary Bronstein, who is in Australia as a guest of the festival. 'I wanted to make an expressive piece of work about what it's like to be a caretaker in a very serious, high-stakes situation, where you feel like the entire universe is against you.'
For most of the film, Linda's husband is nothing more than an angry voice (Christian Slater's, to be precise) on the other end of the phone, offering unwanted advice about how to fix things. The child – heard but not seen – won't or can't eat, and demands almost constant care.
Their home has become unlivable because a leak in the apartment above has caused the ceiling to collapse, so mother and child have moved into a motel room, whose tiny space is filled with the beeps and flashing lights of the machine that pumps life-sustaining nutrients into the child. Linda seeks relief in alcohol, drugs, and sly escapes from the nightmarish claustrophobia of her situation.
There's nothing heroic or stoic about this long-suffering woman – whose tribulations may be real or may be at least partly manufactured in her mind – but she's absolutely anchored in truth.
'The tiny seed that started the entire movie is a real situation I lived through with my daughter – she's 15 now – when she was seven,' says Bronstein. 'She was very seriously ill.'
Bronstein and her husband live in New York City, and the treatment their daughter needed was in San Diego, on the other side of the country. 'So my daughter and I lived together as sort of demented roommates in a small motel room for eight months, and I had a full existential crisis. I was so focused on the situation at hand, which was everything to do with her, that I felt like I was disappearing, literally.'
The things that happen in the film, she adds, aren't all drawn from her actual experience, and she isn't interested in detailing what's factual and what's not. 'What is important to me to get across is that it's all emotionally true.'
Bronstein, who started as an actor before making her directing debut 17 years ago with Yeast (in which she co-starred alongside Barbie writer-director Greta Gerwig), has a small role in this movie, as the doctor in charge of the sick child's care. And her view of Linda is not a particularly kind one.
Doctor Spring represents, Bronstein concedes, the 'self-hatred' she felt at the time. 'But in a more general sense, it is a judgement of mothers who are not being perfect all the time, who are having their problems, who are struggling, who maybe are faced with something they can't handle and need help [with]. You know, there's a lot of helpers in the film, and there's a lot of listeners, or potential listeners, but Linda feels as if she's screaming into the wind and the void and nobody is hearing or helping.'
There is a lot of very dark humour in the film, alongside a deep sense of frustration and confusion. Above all, it's about a side of motherhood that rarely gets addressed in cinema.
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'I want it to spark a conversation about female rage, and why that makes people so uncomfortable,' Bronstein says. 'It makes women uncomfortable too, not just men. It makes everybody uncomfortable, the idea of female rage, because it feels bottomless.'
The love for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You has been almost bottomless too. Since its debut at Sundance in January, it has garnered rave reviews, and earned Rose Byrne the best actress prize at Berlin the following month. But there's a special burden that comes with being the opening-night film at MIFF, one of the biggest film festivals on the planet – namely, that it should spark chatter at the after-party without killing the vibe.
There's every chance it will succeed on both scores. But exactly what sort of chatter are you hoping for, Mary Bronstein?
'I hope electric, that's the word I'm going to use,' she says. 'Curious, with people excited at seeing something they haven't seen before.'
And, she adds, she hopes for 'a lot of car conversations on the way home. That's my goal.'
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