You could have heard a pin drop when the credits began to roll at the screening of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You at Picturehouse Central in London. Over 300 people were reduced to complete silence, many were leaning back in their seats, as if braced for even more physical and emotional impact. When Rose Byrne emerged onto the stage beaming, it felt as though everyone breathed a sigh of relief—she looked a world away from her harried and hostile character on screen.
Actress Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, The Office) moderated the Q&A and began with a question that I think the whole audience wanted to ask — did Byrne get a sense of what the tone of the film was going to be before watching, or was it surprising? It was only a 27 day shoot, with just two or three takes for each scene, so “adrenaline was so high.” She admitted that after shooting was over, she was anxious to see how her character, Lydia, would translate on screen: “I was so scared to see this movie, and I couldn’t even acknowledge that I was scared—I would just be avoiding it and avoiding it.”
When Byrne did finally watch it, she was most struck by the “language of the camera”—it is particularly startling to watch a film on the big screen where the camera hardly deviates from the central character’s face. Jones commented that “the daughter and husband are kind of like ghosts in the film,” so we are repeatedly forced to reckon with Lydia and all of the emotions she experiences—rage, guilt, and loneliness to name just a few.
A particularly interesting segment of the Q&A was when Byrne acknowledged how the film “really reflects the audience,” and different crowds had different reactions: “I watched it at the New York Film Festival, which was great, because it played like a comedy straight away, they just knew they could laugh… and then in Toronto it was a real kind of college crowd, and it played really like a horror, and it was way more interactive. And then in Berlin… it was very cerebral and very German.”
The conversation ended on a heavier note, as Jones asks about the importance of the theme of motherhood in the film: “Motherhood is both revered and ignored, and this film really makes you reckon with the woman… particularly because you don’t see the child. I think once you see the child, obviously your empathy would go (to them).”
For almost the entirety of the film, you will want to look away, but therein lies its brilliance — unlike the characters, the audience is commanded to pay attention to every second of the mother’s unravelling. Byrne delivers such a convincing and devastating performance of a woman on the edge that you are not quite sure if the curtain will ever come down.
Image by Eve Radford for The Student
