\n\tThe venerable but overcrowded \u201cunraveling woman\u201d subgenre gets a shot in the arm with The Currents (Las Corrientes), a lush, hypnotic character study from Swiss-Argentinian filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler.<\/p>\n
\n\tConjuring the troubled inner life of Buenos Aires fashion designer Lina (Isabel Aim\u00e9 Gonz\u00e1lez-Sola) with an uncommon mix of stylistic rigor and feeling, it\u2019s a work of impressive, at times thrilling, assurance from start to finish. A bow at TIFF<\/a> and a slot in the main slate of the New York Film Festival<\/a> should help put the movie\u2019s gifted writer-director on the radar of cinephiles, arthouse distributors and programmers alike.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tThe Currents\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n \tA transfixing existential mystery.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Toronto International Film Festival (Platform) \n\tLina\u2019s beauty and privilege \u2014 her flashy career, sleek apartment, successful spouse and adorable child \u2014 put her in the company of outwardly enviable, inwardly tormented female protagonists from Rosemary Woodhouse to Lydia T\u00e1r<\/a> to whomever Nicole Kidman happens to be playing at the moment; she may also remind you of women in films by Bergman, Bu\u00f1uel, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Todd Haynes and Mumenthaler\u2019s Argentinian contemporary Lucrecia Martel<\/a>. But The Currents never comes off as derivative. The elegance and, especially, empathy with which Mumenthaler captures the gaping chasm between how we present and who we are gives the film a voluptuous pull all its own.<\/p>\n \n\tThe movie\u2019s originality indeed stems from its refusal to stick to the playbook of chilly formalism followed by so much contemporary art cinema. If The Currents looks, at first, to be headed down a punishing path, its most surprising quality is its generosity, its aversion to cheap shocks, button-pushing or finger-wagging about \u2014 snore \u2014 the moral rot eating away at modern society. That\u2019s not to say this story of a woman whose flawless fa\u00e7ade barely cracks even as her insides crumble doesn\u2019t fray your nerves. (It does). But it also stirs your emotions, deploying bold colors, an immersive soundscape that mingles a spectrum of ambient noise with surges of classical music, and a lead performance of riveting translucency.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Currents opens with 34-year-old Lina accepting an award in Geneva. Surrounded by admiring colleagues, she\u2019s the picture of radiant graciousness. Cut to Lina alone in the bathroom, where she briefly sizes up her trophy before sliding it into the trash.<\/p>\n \n\tOut for a walk, Lina ends up striding across a bridge and then, without pause, jumping into the churning river below. Mumenthaler and DP Gabriel Sandru film the incident in long shot, shrewdly depriving us of psychological clues that a tighter frame might have telegraphed.<\/p>\n \n\tLina is rescued, soon returning home to 5-year-old daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) and suave husband Pedro (the appealingly lupine Esteban Bigliardi). Like much in her life, her marriage looks good on paper: Pedro is a reliable parenting partner, an attentive lover, and seems concerned about Lina\u2019s mental wellness. But there\u2019s a shiver of possessiveness in his bearing, something the filmmaker suggests through subtle means like a lingering glimpse of Pedro\u2019s hand gripping Lina\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat nobody knows is that since Lina\u2019s near-drowning in Switzerland, she has been suffering from an extreme aversion to water. Unable to bathe, she breaks out in a rash on her scalp and neck \u2014 though Mumenthaler prudently doesn\u2019t turn Lina\u2019s furtive scratching and greasy hair into a body-horror gimmick, or box her into a story about a single phobia. Lina\u2019s new fear is just the most concrete manifestation of a larger malaise, a kind of paralyzing, terror-inflected numbness.<\/p>\n \n\tThe filmmaker makes deft use of visual and auditory cues to evoke this fugue-like sense of estrangement. She cranks the volume on background noise (construction drilling, a hairdryer, the clackity clack of a sewing machine, the bleeping of a video game), creating a cacophonous soundtrack that both echoes and exacerbates Lina\u2019s dysregulated headspace. A close-up of Lina\u2019s luscious locks cascading over the back of the sofa is held a few extra beats, until it takes on an alien quality \u2014 an eerie image of disembodiment.<\/p>\n \n\tStill, Lina continues to go through the motions at work and at home. Notably, she has turned neither frigid nor vampirically horny, reflecting the filmmaker\u2019s rejection of genre-coded obviousness in favor of nuance and ambiguity. Scenes of Lina and Pedro in bed tingle with erotic intimacy and trepidation, their physical connection shifted but not ruined by Lina\u2019s crisis. Enigmatic as it is, the movie, in its way, offers a grounded portrait of how people handle breakdowns, proceeding with their daily business while in full freakout. Among other things, The Currents is about the exhausting degree of performance required to maintain our outer selves.<\/p>\n \n\tMumenthaler tangles with this theme of identity, contemplating how it intersects with gender and class, as well as how it\u2019s shaped by memory and trauma. But she tethers her inquiries to recognizable human feeling. When Sofia looks askance at yet another take-out dinner, noting that her friend Zoe\u2019s mom does all her own cooking, Lina\u2019s woundedness is palpable. \u201cDoes Zoe\u2019s mom work?\u201d she asks. Sofia\u2019s remark is innocent \u2014 anyone with young kids will wince in recognition of the blithe savagery \u2014 but devastating in how sweepingly it undercuts Lina\u2019s most fundamental life choices.<\/p>\n \n\tThroughout The Currents, Lina is similarly subjected to the world\u2019s judgy gaze. A wealthy client\u2019s granddaughter shades her for having taken her husband\u2019s last name. Her mother-in-law drops off \u201chealthy dishes\u201d because Lina eats \u201cpoorly\u201d (again, the food-shaming!). Lina\u2019s acute sensitivity to such assessments stems from a difficult past she has taken pains to leave behind.<\/p>\n \n\tThe shadow of that history hovers heavily over a scene that finds Lina visiting Amalia (Jazm\u00edn Carballo), an old friend who runs a beauty salon. The mix of wariness, guilt and ride-or-die trust that passes between the two, the sense of debts owed and things unsaid, is haunting. In order to wash Lina\u2019s hair and body, Amalia sedates her; the image of our protagonist, gas mask fastened to her face, asleep as she\u2019s sponged and rinsed possesses an almost Cronenbergian weirdness.<\/p>\n
Cast: <\/strong>Isabel Aim\u00e9 Gonzalez-Sola, Esteben Bigliardi, Claudia Sanchez, Ernestina Gatti, Jazmin Carballo, Patricia Mouzo, Susana Saulquin, Emma Fayo Duarte
Writer-director:<\/strong> Milagros Mumenthaler
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 44 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n