"If I had legs I'd kick you" teaches us to stay in anguish The film starring Rose Byrne finally arrives in Italian cinemas

I watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You on a random morning during an especially stressful week. When I walked out of the cinema, I felt an intense sense of disorientation, almost panic, and found it incredibly hard to return to my normal life made up of WhatsApp messages, emails, video content, and words, words, words. That same evening, I had an appointment scheduled with my therapist. Before seeing the film, I had almost considered cancelling out of exhaustion, but I decided to keep it. Maybe thanks to the film, which I ended up talking about for almost the entire 50 minutes of my session.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the plot

So I’ll tell you about it, too. Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You tells the story of Linda, a woman, mother, wife, and professional (she’s a psychologist) who is extremely stressed and on the verge of collapse. The circumstances certainly don’t help. At the beginning of the film, a major ceiling leak in her bedroom forces her to move into a motel with her daughter (who has serious health issues) while her husband is away for weeks and weeks because of work. Add to that a patient who could hardly be described as disciplined, the beginning of substance abuse, and an ambiguous relationship with a colleague/therapist, and the damage is done. The hole in the ceiling becomes a huge metaphor for her trauma, for the way she is slowly consuming herself trying to keep everything under control, and it keeps getting bigger. Everything feels unsolvable because she is in free fall, and this desperation leads her to make very wrong decisions, in a domino effect of deterioration that you can only follow, horrified, frightened, heartbroken, even slightly nauseated.

A difficult viewing experience

This deterioration is therefore very hard to watch, clearly by the director’s intention, as she set out to create the most claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing film of the moment through extremely tight framing and a constant process of subtraction, but also for more personal, subjective, and gender-related reasons. This is not an article about how disturbing my cinematic experience was, but about how deeply it struck a chord with me. It’s not an article about the film’s message and themes, about the women’s issue (which is clearly present, since the protagonist is a mother and a wife, a woman in some way traumatized by motherhood who cannot confront her trauma, who feels guilty and falls victim to her neuroses), nor is it about the mother-daughter relationship. It’s an article about learning to stay in pain and discomfort long enough to truly feel it, to let it sink in and try to understand something through that stillness, that stubborn permanence, and then let it go. Throwing yourself into the waves and hoping to be okay, without running away but also without clinging to the illusion of control. Easier said than done. Simply feeling - without necessarily searching for a message, a solution, or a moral - is an incredibly powerful exercise in release and liberation. Maybe, and I say maybe, this could be one of the film’s messages.

Finally in Italian cinemas

If you feel brave and ready to spend 1 hour and 53 minutes immersed in discomfort, the film finally arrives in Italian cinemas on March 5, distributed by I Wonder Pictures. In the cast, alongside a brilliant Rose Byrne, are Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Asap Rocky, Mary Bronstein herself (in the role of the child psychologist treating the daughter), and Christian Slater. Presented at Sundance and the Berlinale, it earned Byrne the Golden Globe for Best Actress and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. The competition is fierce, but we’ll see what happens.