‘The Currents’ Review: An Elegant, Elusive Argentine Character Study That Doesn’t Mind Leaving Its Audience Adrift
The jump is filmed in such chilly long shot that you very nearly wouldn’t notice it happening, if not for the brilliant aquamarine overcoat of the jumper, hurling herself from a busy pedestrian bridge in wintry Geneva, dropping like a luminous pin into the freezing Rhône waters below. She is Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a gifted Argentine fashion designer in town to receive an award that means nothing to her. In the opening minutes of Milagros Mumenthaler‘s airily elliptical character study “The Currents,” we’ve already seen her toss the glass tchotchke in the bathroom trash and slip out of the ceremony to pace the streets, before attempting suicide in such a sudden, fluid movement, you wonder if it’s a passing whim.
Nothing initially makes much sense in “The Currents,” and Mugenthaler — a distinctively talented Swiss-Argentine filmmaker who won the top prize at Locarno with her 2011 debut “Back to Stay” — is in no great hurry to make clear, transparent order of her heroine’s flailing, fragmented state of mind. Lina, after all, hasn’t figured herself out, and this patient, intuitive, arrestingly styled film prefers not to be several steps of its protagonist, often assuming her point of view on a world that has slipped out of alignment with her expectations, and with others’ expectations of her.
The result is both fascinating and intractable, an entry in cinema’s rich tradition of deconstructed feminine portraiture that skids ambitiously along a tonal and stylistic spectrum between Hitchcock’s “Marnie” and Todd Haynes’s “Safe.” Not all of Mugenthaler’s sideways turns yield satisfying discoveries, and “The Currents” gets less interesting when it seeks out tidier interior motivations toward its third act. But this is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction, and likely to be the most widely distributed of its helmer’s three features to date following its premiere in Toronto’s Platform competition, with further festival appointments in San Sebastian, Busan and the main New York slate.
We don’t see Lina rescued from the water — just a shot of her briskly entering the lobby of her luxury hotel in a foil emergency blanket — and when she returns to her comfortable apartment in Buenos Aires, where her handsome hotshot husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and adorable five-year-old daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) are waiting for her, it’s as if the whole cryptic incident never happened at all. Save for one key after-effect: Now stricken with an extreme fear of water, Lina does her best to avoid bathing, feigning wellness as her skin breaks out in assorted rashes, and her lustrous mane of hair turns lank and greasy.
Consider it a less enigmatic, more self-inflicted version of the eerie environmental allergy that plagues Julianne Moore’s similarly picture-perfect wife and mother in “Safe” — and likewise plays on Lina’s frayed nerves, exposing manifold insecurities and a debilitatingly heightened sensory perception of every space she’s in, as well as some she’s not. Intricately layered, selectively amplified sound design (sometimes merged with lush, lapping intrusions of classical music) of living wholly in your own head at some points, and dissociatively out of it at others, to the point where Lina begins seeing herself from a distance, an identical stranger through a glass store window. It’s a fleeting, noir-ish detail that follows through on the sinister languor of the film’s pacing, and the uncannily smooth textures and rich oil-paint accents of DP Gabriel Sandru’s lensing — briefly suggesting a reality cracked in two.
Lina’s hydrophobia, then, isn’t the focus of “The Currents,” but one of many colliding conditions bringing her inner life to a disconcerting standstill, as her perplexed husband, frustrated daughter and other, less attentive friends and associates look on from the psychologically distant sidelines. The longer we spend in her opaque but vulnerable company — González Sola’s performance consistently favors unnerving, hairline-fractured serenity over jittery, unhinged tics — the more we sense there’s no great mystery to be unpacked here, just a woman falling behind the beat of a life at once privileged and heavily burdened with domestic, social and professional obligations. (In one lovely, piercing scene, Sofia’s dinner-time observation that Lina never cooks meals like her friends’ mothers do is both innocent and ruthless.)
So it’s a slight shame that, in a subplot that sees Lina delving into her own shuttered family history, Mugenthaler’s script somewhat over-explains personal baggage that has already become glimmeringly implicit. “The Currents” is most exciting when it leaves its audience to float in uncertainty, or in oblique side streams — as in one gorgeous, disorienting sequence where, from the lighthouse-like summit of her apartment building, Lina appears to gain some manner of second sight, omnisciently observing the private routines of other women in her orbit, and for a moment living more peacefully through them.
