‘She’s so rude’: Rose Byrne plays a cracking mother in her taboo-busting new film | film

IIf I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which Rose Byrne just won a Golden Globe, is undoubtedly a horror film. But how could that be? It is the story of a mother, Linda, with a very sick child. You’ll never see the baby, only the outlines of anxious paramedics. You’ll never find out what’s in it, just that it includes a feeding tube. Linda is steadily going crazy, because who wouldn’t? On paper, this is a painful but moving story of love and adversity. Instead, it is claustrophobic and dizzying. Sometimes it’s surreal, like a panic attack in an unsettling dream, and other times it’s too real to look at directly. Never before have I seen motherhood painted as a journey into the abyss. The only movie I’ve seen that looks like this is Eraserhead.

“I was very moved by this film,” says writer-director Mary Bronstein thoughtfully. She is a great conversationalist, frank, open but attentive. Byrne is more conservative. They’re both darkly funny, all the time. They look polished, Hollywood style, in this central London hotel, but they’ve just emerged from a photo shoot. “Eraserhead is about a kind of patriarchal anxiety that only men can experience,” Bronstein says. “And this is a movie about patriarchal anxiety that only a woman can feel. In Eraserhead, he can leave and that’s his anxiety. Linda can’t leave. That’s her anxiety.”

The fundamental horror of the film is that it not only says the unsayable, but puts you in Linda’s frame, and you feel things you’re not allowed to feel. What if loving your child is already destroying you and all you want to do is run away? “Can you love something so much that you choke on it?” Bronstein wonders. “I try to express things that are very uncomfortable, but very real, and are seen as very ugly because they are a betrayal to your child. But they shouldn’t be seen as a betrayal when you say, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ I’m really upset. I’m really angry. I’m really disappointed. I don’t know what to do.” None of this means you don’t love your child.

Seeing Byrne’s character disintegrate – “It’s not fair!” She explodes – a powerful revelation about how narrow the standards of acceptable motherhood are. “Even in the privacy of therapy, she’s not allowed to say things like, ‘Why is this woman having a child with no problems? And I have a child with all these complex problems?'” Bronstein says.

If I Had Legs is based on Bronstein’s own experience in general, but also in particular – in the sense that her daughter, whom she lived with the American film director Ronald Bronstein, suffered a period of serious illness. (She has now recovered and is 15 years old.) Bronstein’s directorial debut, the 2008 camping comedy Yeast, was widely acclaimed. Motherhood, she says, “took a bite out of my career, a bite out of my life, and it took getting to a crisis point where I completely disappeared from being a mother to my daughter, before I could ask, ‘Who is this person that I don’t know anymore?’ It was a real ego death situation, hence the horror elements of the film. What I came up with was, ‘Oh, I’m an artist, I’m a storyteller, I’m this filmmaker, and I’m going to try to do this radically without anyone’s permission.’ It took a complete deconstruction of my life to get that back.

The nature of the daughter’s illness in the film remains ambiguous, in part because, Bronstein says, “If you make it too clear, it becomes one of those stories about a mother running around trying to cure an illness.” The prime example of the genre has to be 1992’s Lorenzo’s Oil, and it would be impossible to overstate how different that film is from that one.

One American reviewer compared Byrne to Charlize Theron in Monster. It’s a striking parallel in drawing, because Theron is physically unrecognizable in this film, hunched over and bulky, while Byrne looks as she did in Bridesmaids, the 2011 comedy in which she plays the uptight, impossibly fragrant, and too-perfect new girlfriend. Both women laugh at the comparison. “I don’t want to take anything away from Charlize Theron, but that was never the idea,” Byrne says.

“I’m going to embarrass you now,” Bronstein says. “Rose is a beautiful woman. So, Linda, without a doubt, a beautiful woman, is going through a really tough time. What does this character look like when she’s not taking care of herself? When she’s not wearing makeup? When she’s not sleeping? So, it’s a regression, but it’s not like a monster.”

It’s as if the ugliness of the idea — the experience of motherhood as selfish and disturbed — has put a filter on what some viewers see. Linda is also not interested in sex at all. She has to move into a hotel at some point and meets a guy played by A$AP Rocky. “That was one of the hardest scenes,” Byrne says. “He’s a very mysterious, charming, wonderful guy – and Linda was constantly turning him down, being very rude. My mind was saying, ‘He seems really nice.’ “Are we sure she won’t want to just chat?” But she’s closed for business.

Bronstein takes up the subject: “I’m also spoiled by the idea of ​​walking into a man’s bedroom. What usually happens in a movie? Yeah, that doesn’t happen here. She can’t even get to that side of herself.” This, I suggest, is part of the reason why motherhood occupies such a strange place in the collective consciousness. “Mothers are put on such a high pedestal, and at the same time they’re completely excluded,” says Bronstein. “It’s very confusing. ‘Am I the most valuable thing in society, or am I at the bottom?’

One interesting development is the fact that Linda, in the midst of a blossoming nervous breakdown, is a therapist herself, and we see her with a client suffering from postpartum depression, who is completely out of touch with the situation. “Yes, she definitely shouldn’t be exercising,” Byrne says. “When I read that in the script, I thought, ‘Okay, this is pivotal.’”

Bronstein had no problem with therapy, having been in and out of it since she was 14, and had good and bad experiences. “My former therapist said to me, by way of discussion, ‘My therapist said…’ And I completely closed my ears at that point, because all I was thinking, and all I was obsessing over, was, ‘This guy has a therapist?’ But then, of course he does, because this is an ethical practice – so this guy has a therapist, who also has a therapist. Where do you end? Can you move on to the master wizard? It’s like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. There’s no wizard. There’s no master wizard. Everyone is like Linda, just a human being struggling.”

They say, no one ever asked about one of the film’s most challenging scenes, except for one student in a Q&A: Linda agonizes over an abortion she had in the past, and goes through the futile questions of, perhaps, if she had not done it, her daughter would not have been sick, or she would have had a different daughter, one who was not sick. “And I think you can be pro-political choice,” Byrne says. “Obviously I am. But at the same time, you acknowledge that this is difficult and still comes as a shock to some women.”

“There are a lot of movies where people talk about abortion, and I wanted to express something that I felt was true, and maybe not what people want to hear: that you can have an abortion, and still have it, and that’s what you’re supposed to do. But for some people, it stays with them,” Bronstein says.

However, this is not a film designed to make liberals think twice about their nuanced differences. Nor is it inflammatory about the structural injustices of motherhood under late capitalism, though Byrne is acerbic and acerbic about the American context, summarizing her position thus: “We take care of the baby when you’re pregnant, but once it’s out, you don’t get any time off from work, you don’t get any day care, and if you want any time off from work, you have to claim that having a baby is a disability.”

The deeply political challenge this film confronts is patriarchy, because the impossible contradictions and iron taboos around motherhood are ultimately a way to make femininity impossible. Was it difficult to make? “I heard a lot of rejections,” says Bronstein, “and they were all qualified by, ‘What if we pulled out here?’ or, ‘What if we didn’t do it?’ I’m not a dummy. I knew what they were saying. People were afraid that no one would like Linda. And that, for some reason, is very scary.”

“We would always say to each other, ‘The audience doesn’t have to like Linda – but,’” Byrne adds we Must.”