Valentina and Nicole Bertani’s Le Bambine (Mosquitoes) begins uncommonly with one of the main characters, Eva (Clara Tramontano), swatting a mosquito, who appears to have come all the way to her room as though looking out just for her. How can a creature so small disturb so badly with its buzzing sound, she asks her 8-year-old daughter Linda (Mia Ferricelli). Eva has decided to leave her wealthy mother’s Swiss villa to spend the summer in Ferrara in Italy, with Linda in tow.
It sets the stage for the world of Mosquitoes which might broadly be called a coming-of-age tale about three girls—Linda and her Italian friends Azzurra (Agnese Scazza) and Martha (Petra Scheggia)—but is essentially all about the adults around them who are in urgent need of growing up. While the three girls are mature enough to understand their freedom, rights and responsibilities, the grown-ups are childish. They haven’t come to terms with themselves, their ambitions and desires and what they expect of themselves in life. They might informally refer to children as little pests but are more of an annoyance themselves. It’s they who are the irritating mosquitoes here.
Based on the director duo’s own childhood experiences, the Italy-Switzerland-France co-production premiered in the competition section at the Locarno Film Festival.
The most distinctive aspect of the film is its unsentimental, no holds-barred world building. How it transports us to the summer of 1997—the time when Princess Diana died as we hear at a point in the narrative—through the place and the people as seen through the eyes of the young girls.
No wonder everything is souped up and exaggerated, especially the batty characters and their singular quirks and the abnormality that lurks in the seemingly normal middle class families and neighbourhoods. There’s something frenetic about the pace with which the story unfolds. Real life gets presented in a hyper real mode right down to the narrowed down 1:1 aspect ratio, the square format, the play with light, the psychedelic colour palette. The fluid moves of the camera become the audience’s ally and takes it along into Ferrara.
The excesses are understandable from the standpoint of the children. There’s something entirely appropriate, for instance, in making a caricature out of the propah neighbour (Marianna Folli) who keeps warning them of the dangers of smoking while being a smoker herself. There’s something resonant in the silence of her dour daughter Lenka (Evanghelina Zhurkina) who is disallowed to get out of the house to be with kids her age. They’d rather come home to be with her is her mother’s unwritten rule.
The filmmakers leave a lot unexplained to approximate the experience of the girls, who are discovering things but not entirely understanding them. The finale is just as ambiguous.
What gets underscored and stays long after the movie is over is the natural, intrinsic rebelliousness of the three girls. There’s more to them than their games and fights. It’s like a sisterhood of resistance that runs deep unlike their mothers, both of whom are far from the carers and nurturers that they are traditionally regarded. Azzurra and Martha’s mom is singularly obsessed with her own desires and ambitions that are enveloped in a sense of confusion. Linda’s mother Eva is weird (which, as Linda puts it, is the prerequisite to being beautiful), enigmatic, insanely attractive to the girls but self-destructive and too dangerous a presence and influence. Someone in need of protection herself than the one to provide for the kids.
Of course, it’s the child actors who bring the film to life scintillatingly. I still can’t get over Linda’s macabre description of her father’s death, just as hilarious as it’s moving and sobering.
