"If I had legs, I'd kick you": notes on a movie hangover

Rose Byrne's Linda is an anti-Ophelia. She tries to drown herself to escape the discursive and material imprisonment that confines her to the bitter (and exhausting) role of a bad mother. The Shakespearean character throws herself into a river because she cannot find, for her latent longings, "a place or a word," as Maria Rita Kehl would say. The Bronsteinian character, in turn, crashes uselessly against the fierce waves of the night tide, but even they, after successive demonstrations of human contempt, reject and spit her back. The only possible rest is the end of the film. But it is true that Linda, as a psychoanalyst, perhaps has more tools to deal with the machinations of female subjectivity than Ophelia, after all . Does her survival make *If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You an optimistic film?

If the protagonist manages, at least minimally, to verbalize and systematize her anxieties on an inhospitable divan, she, in fact, doesn't know how to decipher her own daughter, who refuses to eat. Perhaps that's why Linda devours everything compulsively. She craves revenge. The kickable and invisible child complains, bothers, and screams from off-screen – Bronstein doesn't want us to easily sympathize with her ailing condition or with possible childish charms. The husband, as dominant masculinity projects itself, is judgmental rationality in its purest form: a disembodied voice that doesn't interfere in the messiness of others' care. Our ethical, political, and haptic pact (and that of a tactile camera, always very close) is with the mother who tries to escape the metaphorical and literal holes in her life: from the crater that opens in the ceiling of the apartment, forcing her to move to a shitty hotel room; to the wound in the belly of the girl who is mechanically fed through a tube, the second umbilical cord; or the suggestive and haunting mention that such orifices make to the vaginal duct that gave birth to her: Should Linda have aborted it instead of abandoning the first pregnancy?, she asks herself, without any trace of guilt, facing the abyss.

In her constant (and sometimes concrete) mishaps – here, not even the hamster, fatally injured, is a good person – Linda is defined by her daughter, right in the first scene, as " stretchable " – flexible, elongable, malleable. Byrne, in her own way, also reveals elastic qualities – she microscopically stretches and dilates the lines of her face to weave entire universes.

In the movie theater, the architecture of sound – which never ceases, for there are no silences or voids in maternal hallucinations – amplifies anxieties, collectively echoed in restrained laughter. Horror and humor, which destabilize order through the grotesque, share their unsettling affinities.

In the car after the movie, I felt the cheese Linda had swallowed in one gulp forming knots in my throat. That empathic magic of the image that Jaine Gaines talks about is sometimes a curse. My partner, the tenth of eleven siblings, unearthed from the unconscious a crisis of panic and impotence in his mother, who once threw herself on the floor at home from sheer exhaustion. A Leo and a young widow, she quickly regained her composure. There was no film ending that could rescue her from the cyclical fate of uninterrupted reproductive labor.

My encounter with If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You follows my reading of *Motherhood * by Sheila Heti, and the launch of the All Her Fault series (a title that echoes the cynical phrase recited a thousand times in Bronstein's film), created by Minkie Spiro. The feminist murmurs suggest that we must reconsider the gravity of regrets. Without legs and without sorrows, perhaps Linda could fly.