This short cautionary tale, together with the contemporaneous La madre e la morte (by Arrigo Frusta), Il piccolo spazzacamino, and other titles, formed a series of children’s melodramas produced by Ambrosio that came into vogue in the early 1910s. With their close links to educational literature, they appealed to the substantial numbers of women and children who filled early cinemas, while their success also lay in the ease with which they could be exported. Their key element lay in the performance of child actors such as Maria Bay, the first and youngest (born 1905) to be permanently employed by Ambrosio, often in the role of Firulì, a character borrowed from Gaumont’s Bébé. [A Firulì film starring Maria Bay, Firulì ha vinto alla lotteria (1911), was shown at the Giornate in 2014.]
Wearing a tattered sailor suit, the girl in this short film plays the cross-dressing role of a little brat bent on abusing and harassing all classes and social conditions (a child, an elderly woman, the policeman, the mother). The occasion for repentance, which leads to the resolution of the drama, takes place – as it often does in children’s films – through a device recalling the attractions used in early cinema: as the boy looks through enlarged soap bubbles, he (and with him the viewer) “sees” his mother’s pain and understands he must change his life. The vision is repeated three times, with the same camera movement closing in on the bubbles, not only to confirm the importance of the optical effect through repetition, but also to introduce a principle of temporal linearity from the present to a hypothetical near future. The film stands out above all for the admirable acting of Maria Bay: spontaneous, natural, without a trace of self-consciousness, and entirely at ease with the camera unusually close to her. The micro-focus on Bay and the realism she brings to her role as a child set the scene for a revolutionary approach to performance in Italian silent film. However, this was soon destined to dissolve, just like a soap bubble. – Elena Mosconi