"Years ago, the filmmaker Mary Bronstein's daughter, who was seven at the time, became extremely ill. Bronstein brought her to San Diego for treatment, leaving her husband home in New York. "We had to live as roommates in this really shitty hotel," Bronstein recalled. "There was nowhere to go. I felt very trapped." Every night, after her daughter went to sleep at eight o'clock, Bronstein would hole up in the bathroom with food and a cheap bottle of wine,"
"Eventually, her daughter did get better, and Bronstein channelled the experience into a screenplay with the archly despondent title "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You." Her first feature, the mumblecore comedy "Yeast" (2008), starred Bronstein and Greta Gerwig as twentysomething friends who go on a camping trip and meet a pair of guys played by Josh and Benny Safdie. "If I Had Legs" is about a very different stage of life."
"Her daughter is underweight and on a feeding tube. Her husband is off captaining a ship. Water bursts through her ceiling and floods her apartment, so she and the child move into a dingy motel. She keeps getting berated by a parking attendant at her daughter's recovery center; one of her patients disappears during a therapy session and leaves Linda with a crying baby. "Time is a series of things to get through," Linda laments."
Mary Bronstein cared for her severely ill seven-year-old daughter for eight months in a run-down hotel, experiencing intense isolation and an existential crisis. She turned that experience into the screenplay for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. The film centers on Linda, a Long Island therapist whose life unravels: an underweight daughter on a feeding tube, an absent husband, a flooded apartment, and a cascade of humiliations and responsibilities. Bronstein's earlier mumblecore feature Yeast (2008) starred her and Greta Gerwig, but If I Had Legs focuses on a later, bleaker stage of life and motherhood.
Read at The New Yorker
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