Mosquitoes (Le bambine) is a movie full of youth’s yearning for freedom and the desire to play, as well as the impetuous and cheeky attitude that childhood is riddled with. We are also reminded that adults can be quirky, wild, and dysfunctional, and children sometimes survive adolescence because of, or in spite of, their parents.
Set in the summer of 1997, eight-year-old Linda (Mia Ferricelli) and her mother swap her grandmother’s Swiss villa for a modest apartment in a small Italian town. They have no money to stock the fridge or pay for electricity. Linda’s mother, Eva (Clara Tramontano), promises they will be free. The truth is, Eva is desperate to escape the watchful eye of her own mother, who, in one scene, she refers to as “the bitch”.
Choosing to return to a place with personal memories, Eva reconnects with some old friends and soon spirals into destructive and neglectful behavior. She becomes the subject of scandalous gossip and makes a habit of forgetting about Linda, who is kicked out of her own home by a strange man her mother keeps for company. Fortunately for Linda, she befriends ten-year-old Azzurra (Agnese Scazza) and her younger sibling Marta (Petra Scheggia), whose own mother (Jessica Piccolo Valerani), unnamed in the film, is a powerful, if at times distant, presence in their lives.
There is an entry in Marguerite Duras‘ 1984 autobiographical novel, The Lover, where she writes: “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.”
The vivid depiction of motherhood in Valentina and Nicole Bertani’s Mosquitoes echoes Duras’ sentiment. The directors might believe the story is told through the eyes of Linda, Azzurra, and Marta, but Eva and the unnamed mother refuse to accept the supporting role thrust on them by the directors and their co-writer, Maria Sole Limodio. The mother represents the beating heart of their childhood, which will loom large in their lives.
Rooted in the personal, Mosquitoes is not about three dreamt-up children. Instead, it’s the Bertani sisters’ reckoning with their own childhood, which they describe as a generically “fierce time” in the film’s press notes. “[…] there are really only two ways to deal with it: go to therapy or turn it into a film. We chose the latter.” After years of shaping “a personal memory”, they say, they are “finally ready to share our secrets with anyone willing to listen.”
Mosquitoes, however, is not a condemnation of motherhood. Instead, it’s about two mothers trying their best, even as they fail to conform to society’s view of the “perfect mother”. There’s a genuine love between Eva and Linda, and Azzurra and Marta’s mother is protective. There’s the temptation to psychoanalyze these two women, but the Bertani sisters only scratch the surface of the characters and never wade into the depths of their personas.
This is a logical choice when the directors are revisiting their childhoods from the point of view of their ten and nine-year-old selves. For the audience, however, there’s a longing to understand these characters, who appear to be struggling with their identity both as mothers and with who they were in their lives before they had children.
As much as the Bertani sisters encourage compassion, these women have a flavor of the strange and crazy. Hence, Mosquitoes becomes about the limitations of a child’s point of view and how one’s mother is a presence that must be reckoned with in the life that follows.
The colorful and vibrant world of Mosquitoes suggests the Bertani sisters are after an exaggerated reality that becomes its own form of intoxicating and exhilarating craziness. Cinema is, after all, a transportive medium, and in the case of Mosquitoes, it’s easy to mistake its jarring start for transporting us inside the imaginations of its directors. The space we enter into, however, is one where memory and imagination, or rather, creative licence, merge.
The camera starts out as a fly that enters Eva’s personal space, which calls to mind the energetic opening of Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 sci-fi comedy Men in Black. This playful use of the pesky insect can be taken as a bit of cinematographic flair. Another way of looking at it, however, is that the fly is symbolic of the Bertani sisters reentering their childhood.
What then, should we make of Eva angrily swatting a fly and saying to Linda, Azzurra, and Marta, “They seem to keep following me. Bitches!” Whether intentional or not, the fly becomes a metaphor for how we carry our past with us, which can be an unwelcome or difficult companion. This, of course, recalls the directors’ description of childhood as a fierce time.
The film’s authorship brims with an energy that makes it difficult for the story to settle either visually or narratively. The idiom “riding by the seat of your pants” is a good way to describe Mosquitoes, given the urgency to infuse the story with impetuousness and attitude.
Mosquitoes can leave you feeling disconnected, like a dream that fades the moment you wake. This is not helped by the likelihood that the Bertani sisters wanted to create an experience that would rely as much on the sensory as themes and ideas, and so, it never carries itself as a message-driven film.
The collection of engaging characters, including Azzurra and Marta’s queer babysitter Carlino (Milutin Dapčević), their neighbor, Lenka (Evanghelina Zhurkina), and her own overprotective, quirky, and repressed mother (Marianna Folli), shows the strength of the supporting cast. While it would have been nice to see their characters developed, especially in the drama of Carlino’s queer romance and anxieties about feeling like he truly belongs, the directors and Limodio do enough. It serves to complement the limitations of the child’s point of view and the emphasis of adult anxieties on the peripherals of a child’s consciousness, which are seen and heard, is an effective touch.
Whether the sisters Bertani succeed in breaking new ground or not, they unapologetically succeed in charting their own course. Mosquitoes exists on its own narrative and aesthetic terms, lending it a punkish vibe. However, it’s difficult not to be aware of its artifice, and its directors’ fingerprints are all over the film.
As much as we’re intrigued by Mosquitoes‘ characters, we find ourselves looking beyond them, with a burning curiosity about the directors themselves.Nonetheless, this is a rollicking-fun début for the sisters, whose depiction of human imperfection plays an impetuous tune on one’s heartstrings.