Directed by: Milagros Mumenthaler
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
74/100
In the opening of Milagros Mumenthaler’s superlative third feature, “The Currents,” Lina, an Argentine fashion designer on a business trip in Switzerland instinctively jumps from a bridge. Upon her return to Buenos Aires, she develops a crippling fear of water that gradually erodes her sleek, bourgeois family life.
Mumenthaler’s film is recessive and mysterious, a throwback to the anti-psychological dramas that directors like Lucrecia Martel were making through the early 2000s. Although various metaphorical dimensions of water are explored, chief among them the feeling of being trapped in a vortex between Lina’s escapist desire and maternal love, “The Currents” is a film about keeping up appearances in a disembodied society, a struggle that renders Lina reserved and opaque. When she regularly undergoes anesthesia to wash her hair and attend to the rashes that grow on her scalp, or when she’s faced with the reality of garment fittings at her job, Lina’s body seems to be rejecting the aesthetics of contemporary urban society.
What Lina seems to desire is a return to pan-European romanticism, which her coworker wants to use as the foundation for the company’s next collection for its sensuality and connection to nature. When an image of Millais’ “Ophelia” flashes on the coworker’s screen, Lina’s leap is immediately reframed. Occasionally, “The Currents” dips into Lina’s romantic fantasies in sequences set to Holst’s song ‘Venus,’ used here as a sly nod to Bernard Hermann (who conducted an infamous recording of the entire “Planets” suite) and his work for Alfred Hitchcock. This influence also informs the incredulity of “The Currents’” premise, which could be seen as a grasp towards the relative romanticism of “The Birds” or “Marnie.” These flights of fancy are some of the year’s most beautiful passages of filmmaking. In particular, a late-film sequence where Lina and her daughter find refuge in an imaginary lighthouse whose shimmering light rains down upon the inhabitants of the city below, elevates “The Currents” to one of the year’s major films.
Crucially, this European ideal remains out of reach for Lina. She fails to float down the river like Ophelia, and her subsequent attempts to flee her life are routinely foiled. While another character describes Lina’s mixture of aspiration and frustration as a kind of love, her paralyzing malaise says otherwise.
“The Currents” Trailer
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