Rose Byrne
“IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU” My rating: B (PPV on various services)
113 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The first thing you see in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a looming closeup of Rose Byrne’s face. Her character, Linda, is being mom shamed by an unseen woman — some sort of physician — about her handing of her young daughter’s medical situation.
Just a few seconds of staring into Linda’s eyes betrays an ever-changing wash of emotions. Defiance, aquiescence, guilt, cajoling, panic…Linda’s on a feeling-fueled roller coaster. She’s trying to hold it together, but her desperation is everywhere creeping through.
Things just go downhill from there.
“If I Had Legs…” features a great performance from Byrne. It is also a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
Unpleasant because Linda is circling the drain and hasn’t the strength to pull herself out.
Here’s her situation: Her daughter (voiced by Delaney Quinn, who is never fully seen) has an eating disorder so dangerous that she’s being fed through a tube inserted into her abdomen.
Linda must try to get the kid to eat real food while hooking her up nightly to a feeding machine. She’s got no help in dealing with her whining, manipulative offspring because her husband is away for several weeks on business (Christian Slater provides his voice in mansplaining phone conversations).
Linda and the child move to a transient motel after a leaky pipe causes the ceiling of the family’s apartment to cave in. The crew hired to remediate the black mold and make repairs are doing a lousy job— when they bother to show up at all.
Things are no better on the work front. Linda is a psychoanalyst (talk about a case of “physician, heal thyself”!). Her clients include a postpartum-plagued young mother (Danielle Macdonald) who abandons her baby, expecting Linda to care for it, and a demanding young man (Daniel Zolghadri) who has the hots for his shrink.
Linda is herself undergoing therapy from a colleague (Conan O’Brien, solid) who is clearly bored with sessions that have become a repetitive emotional merry-go-round.
In fact, Linda has taken the plunge from merely miserable to self-destructive. She’s hitting the bottle and often abandons her sleeping child to engage in misadventures with a fellow resident of the motel (A$AP Rocky).
To emphasize Linda’s isolation, writer/director Bronstein rarely lets Byrne share the frame with a fellow actor.
And then there’s the question of how much of what we see is actually happening and how much is the product of Linda’s overworked nervous system. For instance, what’s with the eerie dots of light that swarm like fireflies in the black hole of her ceiling?
Bottom line: I’m in awe of Byrne’s work here. It’s Oscar-level and then some.
But the film itself is tough going.
Zoey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck
“NOUVELLE VAGUE” My rating: B (Netflix)
106 minutes } MPAA rating: R
I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” his recreation of the 1959 making of “Breathless,” the French independent film that introduced a whole new cinematic vocabulary and launched the directing career of Jean-Luc Godard.
But I wonder… will anyone who is not already a hard-core film geek, who had not seen “Breathless” repeatedly, who is unaware of Godard’s influence…will anyone else understand or appreciate it?
Well, screw ‘em. “Breathless” is a film fanatic’s wet dream, a story of an outsider who makes an end run around movie conventions and created one of the seminal works of the 20th century.
Linklater’s approach is both reverent and impish…he understands what made “Breathless” work and tries to apply the same ethos to “Nouvelle Vague,” even to the point of using the same film frame ratio and grainy black-and-white palette that Godard emplioyed.
Guillaume Marbeck is absolutely spot on as Godard, the cryptic film critic who wants to make his own movies. Godard is plenty weird (he wears sunglasses 24/7 and appears to live in his own world) but he somehow manages to inspire a company of young moviemakers to break all the rules to create a masterpiece on a starvation budget.
Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo, the young Gallic boxer/actor who would become an international star as a result of ”Breathless.” He doesn’t look all that much like Belmondo (whose nose was one of a kind) but he nails the body language and languid/sexy humor.
Zoey Deutch, on the other hand, is a dead ringer for American actress Jean Seberg, who was highjacked into doing the film and, despite numerous attempts to bail from the production, gave a career-defining performance.
Of the supporting perfs I was taken with Matthieu Penchant’s Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who shot scenes on the streets of Paris while hidden in a handcart, and Bruno Dreyfurst as Georges de Beauregard, the exasperated producer who nevertheless stuck with Godard to make history.
“Nouvelle Vague” (the title translates as “New Wave” and refers to the generation of young French filmmakers that included giants like Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer) oozes youthful exuberance and intellectual precocity. It’s both lighthearted romp and a serious appreciation of an important moment in cinema history.
In other words, it’s a lot of fun.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 