This is most decidedly not the kind of film folks on average would expect from Lina Wertmüller: a straightforward exercise in popular cinema. She made four of them inbetween her frivolously Fellinian debut The Basilisks (1963) and her true international breakthrough as an autrice, The Seduction of Mimi (1972): a commedia all’italiana omnibus, two musicarelli and a western – all being straightforward entertainments as well as parodies of their respective genres.
Considering her penchant for judiciously dosed histrionics and a sense for the grotesque at heart of all that life we call real, it feels fitting that she should show a curious excellence at doing musicals. Set in good parts in an academy for Swiss Guards, Don’t Sting the Mosquito perplexes among other things with a minimalist song-and-dance number featuring papal soldiers-in-the-making singing “Switzerland!” while wiggling in synch with their halberds (after an earlier joke about turning battle banners into diapers), a delirious number in split-screen, a bonkers low-key hop-around in wild west drag, and an overall use of mauve that leaves even LSD-savvy viewers in a state of daze. For all the love and admiration Lina Wertmüller is more than due: if only she had made just a few more movies like Don’t Sting the Mosquito…!
Olaf Möller