Isabella Rossellini’s Sly Maternal Instinct

Some Mother’s Day tributes are less wholesome than others, and thank heaven for that. “Mammas,” a set of short films (two to three minutes each) appearing Sunday on the Sundance Channel and sundancechannel.com, reflects the distinctive character of its creator, Isabella Rossellini â€" a blend of innocence, sophistication and sly smuttiness. It’s a long way from flowers, chocolates and brunch.

Ms. Rossellini did an earlier set of shorts for Sundance about animals’ sex lives (“Green Porno”). In “Mammas” she claims to be investigating what constitutes the maternal instinct (which leaves a lot of space for the discussion and depiction of sex and reproduction). What she’s really doing is sending up some of the typical, or stereotypical, complaints about motherhood.

Upset by your stretched-out, child-bearing belly? You could be a cichlid fish, which carries its eggs in its mouth and actually loses weight during pregnancy. Frustrated by trying to feed your family on your spouse’s paltry salary? You could be a dunnock, a bird whose females practice polyandry, taking on two or three husbands when food is scarce.

Ms. Rossellini imparts these lessons by enacting the animals herself, in whimsical and often highly unflattering costumes involving elaborate headgear, extensive padding and lots of plastic garbage bags. The films have the appearance of colorful, mildly surrealistic children’s theater, but the scenes â€" with Ms. Rossellini’s straight-faced gravitas â€" are often playfully but strictly adult, as when a cardboard-cutout male cichlid fish (complete with dastardly mustache) sprays what looks like white silly string in her face, fertilizing the eggs in her mouth.

The tone of “Mammas” is questioning and satirical â€" celebrating a female spider that turns its body into food for its children, Ms. Rossellini asks, with an increasingly fretful expression: “What’s greater than self-sacrifice? It’s what makes a woman a woman. Isn’t it?”

But she allows herself one quick, quiet moment of Mother’s Day sentiment. Discussing a bird that will pretend to be wounded in order to draw predators away from its nest, she says: “If I were as talented at pretending as the piping plover, I would be a Sarah Bernhardt. An Ingrid Bergman.”