In this episode a film (If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You) about a mother who is burdened by caring for her young daughter who suffers from a serious eating disorder; and a comedy with a rather dark edge: the film The Last Viking.
Final editing/correction: Cathri van de Haar
Film
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, in theaters from December 18
Mother derails due to ongoing misfortune
Linda has a daughter with a serious eating disorder, which demands all her attention. We don’t get to see the unnamed daughter, at least not completely: only parts of her body and we hear her, sometimes pleading voice. In contrast to Linda: the camera makes her – often in close-up – the center of all scenes in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You.
Her daughter’s illness is by no means the only chronic or incidental misfortune that befalls Linda: a huge leak causes a hole in the ceiling of her house – a hole that will later take on almost metaphysical significance. As a psychotherapist, she has to deal with difficult clients; one of them, a woman with postnatal depression, even walks out of her office and leaves her baby with Linda. A parking attendant gets under her skin every day. Her daughter’s aggressive hamster is run over and killed. And in the meantime, Linda has to cope with everything on her own, because for much of the film her husband is only available for advice by phone; he works long periods at sea. The damage to her house means that mother and daughter have to seek refuge in a motel. Where Linda gets along well with one of the employees. Well, initially, anyway… And to make matters worse, she finds herself forced to cross her professional boundaries. Here we have a series of events which, presented in a dry and objective manner, could also have resulted in a black comedy. But that is not the direction in which director/screenwriter Mary Bronstein takes her film, although it is not entirely free of wry humor.
Delusions
Linda endures everything in an alternation of both rage and feigned resignation: “Everything is under control.” You would think that as a therapist she would be sufficiently trained in the kind of advice she herself needs to stay afloat. Quod non, because, she says, “I’m one of those people who shouldn’t be mothers.” We see her slowly succumbing to the pressure of motherhood, her projections and delusions merging with reality. That hole in the ceiling and the hole in her daughter’s body where a feeding tube enters mirror each other and take on a metaphorical meaning, perhaps even more than that. The film’s sound design and often oppressive staging make Linda’s claustrophobia palpable. No wonder: Bronstein wanted her film to capture the deep-rooted feeling “of that desperate mental state in which you are afraid that not only is everything falling apart, but that it is all your fault.”
Exaggeration
But you can also see Linda’s drama as a nightmarish exaggeration of one of the big questions of our time: why do we continue to speed up our lives when we know it makes us sick? The mental consequences of this ‘acceleration’ are not solely a matter for psychiatry, because that discipline simply does not have the tools to address the cultural or existential causes of this suffering. After all, it works with disorders, classifications, and treatment protocols – necessary in a medical context, but inadequate for a social problem that extends beyond the vulnerable individual.
And yet this film ends with what I consider to be an uplifting, hopeful image. Highly recommended!
Henk Maassen
Film
The Last Viking, now in theaters
Seeing humor in morbid misery
Anker is released after serving a fifteen-year prison sentence. His brother Manfred buried the loot from his bank robbery at the time and is the only one who knows where it is hidden. Unfortunately, Manfred has developed a mental disorder, more specifically dissociative identity disorder. He says he can no longer point out the location, and what’s more, he sometimes thinks he is a Viking, and sometimes the reincarnated John Lennon. With a bloodthirsty rival hot on their heels, the brothers nevertheless set out in search of the money. But above all, in search of themselves.
That, in a nutshell, is the premise of the thoroughly hilarious The Last Viking.
Painful jokes
That mental disorder, by no means the only one in this film, incidentally, should be taken with a grain of salt in terms of DSM-5. Anyone who is bothered by this suffers from the currently widespread curse of literalism and psychological realism. Director/screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen does not subscribe to this. He counters it with his free imagination and, with his film, asks questions such as: Which is better: ugly or beautiful? And how can everyone be equal? As in his earlier films, the focus is on trauma and mental health, and their familial inheritance. He does not portray psychiatric disorders in a caricatural, but rather in a sweetly comical way, as was done, for example, in the Dutch series Loenatik, but in a dark, absurdist form with painful jokes, slapstick, and above all brutal violence and ditto manners, complete with hilarious running gags about IKEA and the Holocaust. I laughed out loud a few times.
Underneath it all, Jensen always has a melancholic, compassionate heart: call it a rough exterior, a soft interior. The filmmaker himself says: “The film explores how our identity is shaped by the perception of others, in the hope that despite challenges, we can discover our true selves. The film emphasizes that people are more than one thing and encourages a more holistic view that is inherently more forgiving and less judgmental.”
Jensen calls it a dirty and deeply disturbing drama, only to then see the fun and comedy in it. Once again, he was able to call on famous Danish actors such as Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas.
Henk Maassen