Review by Aksharaa Agarwal
If you hold sand too tightly, it slips between your fingers. The tighter you grip, the faster it runs. The more it runs the more aware you become of your own incapacity to truly hold onto something, of unclosing chasms, gaping holes.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You harbors just as much a conditional of barely contained assault as its amusing title promises. As far as holes go, this film features a few prominent ones. Don’t try too hard to hold on. Just open your eyes, for down and away we go.
Strategically shot, provocatively framed, Mary Bronstein’s lens suffocates you successfully, a claustrophobia which seems like it won’t ever let up. You can’t blame her, she’s just trying to capture what it’s really like. Besides, it’s not so bad to be shoved against an utterly believable Rose Byrne, whose immediate exasperation as Linda is absolutely unavoidable. Just as unavoidable is what is exasperating her. There is much to weigh her mind, and it just develops, worsens, matures, like a malicious, malignant mold. Literally.
No exposition assuages your uncertainty, and no answers are given for obvious, incessantly demanded questions. Just take it as it comes. You’re supposed to somehow know everything and also don’t feel bad if you don’t, it’s not your fault. Am I talking about the film or from the film? It’s hard not to tag along with Linda, there’s absolutely nothing else to be done about it. And she so desperately needs someone, a second pair of hands, set of eyes, a second thinking mind, someone to offload all her burdens. Yet there’s nothing you can do, but watch, like everyone around her does instead of really helping. What exactly is wrong with her daughter? Where the hell is her husband? Why won’t anyone tell her what to do? How can she stop it, fix it, can they see she’s trying so hard? Do they know what it’s like at night?
Craftily, we are cornered by the same frugality of information into her helpless, confused, frustrated mental state. We know what she cannot prove to anyone, that no matter how many people are engaged and around, she’s really alone in this, and it is too much for one person alone.
So when she can’t sleep and needs a break and pushes herself for her own sake, when flecks of light and fog that floods one’s vision begin to frequent the screen, we understand what must be her impulse, its creeping possibility, too.
What if I just…fall in?
That’s the point If I Had Legs wants to drive you to consider. When it comes to things you just can’t fix, don’t you just want to succumb? Linda swings from one pendulum pole to the other every day, l’apelle du vide crossed with cries for help and acknowledgement. Is it more like quicksand or a landslide? It is that daily oscillation, a deepening of ongoing conditions, which we too are steeped in everyday. The chasm remains, grows wider till we just about fall in, and it is mesmerising, captivating, terrifying, calling to us. What is it? Can’t we just go in? How many times has the onslaught of the days left us breathless? We are no different, and that’s what we find to be true if we press beyond the point. From the other side of a screen through which we cannot be heard, and can only hope to be gleaned, we whisper our understanding. We see her, we are her witnesses. Even when it feels like hell she isn’t really alone. The same goes for us. So we remain, if only to prove that one point, futile or not. Which is exactly where you just know Bronstein wanted you to get.
Eventually all that was withheld is revealed- the where, how, what of it. An absolutely stellar slate of A-listers is unveiled rather startlingly, a stand in for some measure for reward. How much can we stand to ask for even as we turn away from what we ask? Eventually she must see, as we come to, that to accept the help she seeks she needs to unclench her fist.
If I Had Legs is by no means an easy watch, not that it was ever intended to be. It leaves you gasping for air, till you too are caught like she is, turning away even as you hope to be turning into comfort and safety and relief. Yet, you laugh, you shake your fists, you cover your eyes, you lean toward the vision. We want to keep our eyes open just as much as we want someone else to see through them for us – or, as David Ehrlich of Indiewire puts it in a larger context – our biggest problem is that everything is our biggest problem, comparing it to a dolly zoom, destabilizing our depth perception. In If I Had Legs, it’s deliberate: notice it. If over 90% of the runtime pulverises personhood and parenthood as perplexity, and perpetual flux, in painstaking detail, it is the final scene that can teach us the only thing we can possibly hope to know, regardless of whether we are in it now or never will be: when the waves crash, let them. In fact, crash into them with equal vigour- that is the only way, through. After all, what was it that Camus said at the end of an arduous text about the larger matter of absurdity? One must imagine Sisyphus happy.