Catching Up with The Currents

“The Currents exhibits a rare kind of formal invention, such that each new shot hits your consciousness as a kind of cognitive surprise,” writes Michael Sicinski. “At the same time, the film hangs together perfectly as an aesthetic object. That’s because Mumenthaler has entirely aligned our point of view with Catalina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), whose identity is in such disarray that she perceives the world as if it were some strange text she cannot decipher . . . This slip into whatever Catalina is undergoing—psychosis? a fugue state? PTSD?—would be illegible to the viewer were it not for Mumenthaler’s absolute formal control.”

Mumenthaler’s first feature, Back to Stay (2011)—the winner of both the Golden Leopard and the FIPRESCI Prize in Locarno—focuses on three sisters raising themselves after the death of their grandmother. In The Idea of a Lake (2016), a photographer comes to grips with the absence of her father, who disappeared in 1976 after the Argentine coup d’état. Born in Argentina, Mumenthaler was raised in Geneva, which is where we find Catalina in the opening sequence of Mumenthaler’s third feature.

Lina, as her friends call her, is a fashion designer of considerable renown, and she’s in Switzerland to be honored with an award. Having accepted, she steps into the restroom, dumps the glass trophy in the trash, and wanders the city alone before leaping into the icy waters of the Rhône. Rescued, she returns to Buenos Aires, where her husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and five-year-old daughter (Emma Fayo Duarte) will have to come to terms with Lina’s new phobia: water. She can’t even bring herself to open a tap, never mind bathe.

For 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson, The Currents is “fitfully compelling,” but Anderson finds “little in Mumenthaler’s film that rivets and deranges like those by two of her compatriots, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008) and Laura Citarella’s Dog Lady (2015), both of which also feature female protagonists who have broken with reality.”

The Currents is “both fascinating and intractable,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “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 Mumenthaler’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.”

“Mumenthaler beautifully portrays Lina’s life adrift and especially her relationships with women who offer assorted versions of being in the world, from her young assistant to her mother-in-law to a shop seamstress,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “The filmmaker’s absorbing audiovisual approach culminates in a virtuosic scored montage involving the famous searchlight atop the Palacio Barolo.”

Writing for Reverse Shot, Lawrence Garcia notes that The Currents “eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition.”