La Mosquitera (The Mosquito Net)

The Mosquito Net (2010)  is a Spanish style tragi-comedy of screen writer/director Agusti Vila starring Emma Suarez as Alicia, Eduard Fernandez as Miguel, Martina Garcia as Ana, Marcos Franz as Luis, Alex Bartlori as Sergi. 

As the film opens, we see a middle aged husband Miguel just home from work. Being a person who wants everything neat and tidy, finding another unknown dog in the house proves too much for him. He starts to argue with his wife Alicia, an aspiring writer and illustrator of children's book. But they have to argue in whispers because his wife wants him to be gentle at all times! But they already had 6 dogs and cats. Alicia wants another one.  Miguel says the maximum is 5. Eventually they settle at 6. The dogs and cats were picked up by their teenage son Luis from the streets.  To be "empathic" to their pets, Alicia and her son Luis even eat like them, lapping up their food from their plate with their tongue! 

As the story develops, Miguel and Alicia no longer speak or sleep with each other. This happens after a quarrel in which Luis brings home an injured pigeon hoping to cure it. But they discover to their surprise that it has died on the floor. One of their dog then comes near to smell it. Miguel hits the dog gently to drive it away so that it will stop sniffing it. Alicia accuses Miguel of cruelty when obviously that is not the case at all. That is the last straw. 

Then they have a new new maid Ana, an immigrant worker. Miguel falls for her, frequently offering her money which she refuses but she eventually accepts after his repeated insistence. After she takes a wad of money, she undresses herself but Miguel does not want her to behave as a whore. He pulls back her dress and then undresses her again by himself! It was obvious he wants to be in control. Even if he wants sex, he wants to maintain the image of a gentleman!

In the meantime, Alicia herself falls for Sergi, one of Luis's best friends, which she met on an occasion Luis was otherwise engaged and the relationship starts by her offering him a lift home on the eve of Luis's birthday. She has bought a ring for Luis which also happens to fit Sergi's finger. She offers it there and then to Sergi and says she will buy another one for Luis. But he says that the ring has Luis's name engraved on it. So she says in that case, she will buy another one with Sergi's name engraved. Sergi comes to Luis birthday party. They got drunk and she seduces him in her drunkenness but afterwards finds she cannot stop seeing him. But when he begins to treat her as a whore, she finds that it is no longer so acceptable. 

The film ends when one of Alicia's bizarre stories gets published, after the dysfunctional couples' respective romantic flings find after all that happened, that they should no longer be separated by their differences, their rigiditeis and be more tolerant of each other's weaknesses than before. 

The main lines of the plot is contrasted with a sub-line, relating to Alicia's sister, a single mother who fools herself that when she was "teaching" her 4 year old daughter the consequences of the latter's desires, she was doing it for her daughter's own good. We are shown scenes in which she forces her to eat three chocolate icecreams because her daughter asks for a third "big" one after she tells her not to have any more, burns her because she wanted to play with fire and then forces her to step on to three eggs which she places on the floor so that she can feel how messy a broken egg is,. All the while she was thus punishing her daughter who has not yet reached the age of reason, she keeps on denying that she was in fact acting under the influence of her own anger and rage for her daughter's definace of her will. 

In this film is Vili trying to say how we always manage to hurt those who are closest to us and those whom we are supposed to love because of the rigidity with which we hold on to our own  only partially justified values by masquerading them as moral correctness? Is he trying to tell us that it is not just what we are trying to do which matters but how we do what we think is right which is more important: whether we should do what we think is right with love, with sensitivity of how the others feel?  At times, the behavior of the characters in the film verges on the absurd.

The title of the film in fact refers to a story created by Alica about a girl who is so afraid of stepping on ants when she walks and so afraid of hurting the mosquitos that she will not use a mosquito net when she sleeps! 

The acting is excellent, the photography competent. There is a nice blend of pathos and irony in the way Vila shows how the acts of the characters suggest the contrary of what they think or say they are doing.  There are also some scenes about the parents of Miguel who are both of advanced years and look as if they are suffering from Alzhemer's disease and who keep on forgetting to turn off the gas. Is that not what Vali is quietly suggesting: that in the end we shall all become human vegetables. If so, what then is the point of arguing and insisting upon what must be strictly adhered to in our values?