‘The Currents’ Review: A Woman Who have Everything Comes Undone in A Luscioously Crafted Argentinian Spellbinder

The venerable but overcrowded “unraveling woman” subgenre gets a shot in the arm with The Currents (Las Corrientes)A lush, Hypnotic Character Study from Swiss-Argentinian Filmmaker Milagros Milanthaler.

Conjurying the Troubled Inner Life of Buenos Aires Fashion Designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) with an uncommon mix Assurance from Start to Finish. A Bow at Tiff and A Slot in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival Should Help Put The Movie’s Gifted Writer-Director on the Radar of Cinephilas, ARTHUSE DISTRIBUTORS AND PROGRAM.

Lina’s Beauty and Privilege – Her Flashy Career, Sleek Apartment, SuccessFul Spause and Adorable Child Lydia Tár to Whover Nicole Kidman Happens to Be Playing at the Moment; She May Also Remind You of Women in Films by Bergman, Buñuel, Antonioni, Cassavetes, TODD HAYNES AND MUMENTHALER’S ARGENTINIAN CONTEMPORARY LUCRECIA MARTEL. But The Currents Never Comes Off As Derivative. The Elegance and, Especialyally, Empathy with Whoh Mumenthaler Captures of the Gaping Chasm Between Howen How We Present and Who We Are Gives The Film A VolupTouos Pull All Its Own.

The Movie’s Originality Indeed Stems from It 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 Society. That’s not to say this story of a woman who Flawless Façade Barely Cracks Even as Her Insides Crumble Doesn’T Fray Your Nerves. (IT does). But it also stiirs your imotions, deploying Bold Colors, an immersive Soundscape that mingles a spectrum of ambient noise with surgs of classical Music, and a lead performs.

The Currents OPENS WITH 34-YEAR-OLD LINA Accepting An Award in Geneva. Surround by admiring Colleagues, She’s 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.

Out for A Walk, Lina Ends Up String Across A Bridge and Ten, 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 TIGHER FRAME MIGHT HAVE Telegrapi

Lina is Rescused, Soon Returning Home to 5-Year-Eld Daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) and Suave Husband Pedro (The Appealingly Lupine Esteban Bigliardi). Like Much in Her Life, Her Margin Looks Good on Paper: Pedro Is A Reliable Parenting Partner, An Attitifical Lover, and Sems Concerned About Lina’s Mental Welleness. But There’s A Shiver of Possessiveness in his Bearing, Someting the Filmmaker Suggests Through Subtle Means Like A Lingering Glimps of Pedro’s Hand Griping Lina’s Desk.

What Nobody Knows is that Since Lina’s Near-Drowning in Switzerland, She was Been Suffering from An Extreme Aversion to Water. Unable to Bathe, She Breaks Out in a Rash on Her Scalp and Neck-Thought Mumenthaler Prudently Doesn’t Turn Lina’s Furtive Scratching and Greasy Hair Into a Body A Single Phobia. Lina’s New Fear Is Justte Concrete Manifestation of a Larger Malaise, A Kind of Paralyzing, Terror-Inflected Numbness.

The 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 CLACKS CLACKRA Lina’s Dysregulated HeadSpace. A Close-Up of Lina’s Luscious Locks Cascading Over the Back of the Sofa Is Held A Few Extra Beats, Until It Takes on An Alien Quality-An Erie Image of Disembodiment.

Still, Lina Continues to go through the motions at work and at home. NotBly, she have turned Neither Frigid Nor Vampirically Horny, Reflection The Filmmaker’s Reject of Genre-Coded Obvioousness 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’s Crisis. Enigmatic as It is, The Movie, In Its Way, Offers A Ground 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.

Mumenthaler Tangles with this theme of Identity, ContemPlating How It Intersto Inters With Gender and Classes, As Well As How It’s 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’s Mom Does All Her Own Cooking, Lina’s Woundedness Is Palpable. “Does Zoe’s Mom Work?” she asks. Sofia’s Remark Is Innocent – Anyone with Young Kids WINCE IN RECOGNITION OF THE BLITHHE SAVAGERY – BUT Devastating in How Sweepingly IT Undercuts Lina’s MOST FUNDAMENTAL LIFE LIFE CHOICESSES.

Throughout The CurrentsLina is similearly subjected to the World’s Judgy Gaze. A Wealthy Client’s Granddaughter Shades Her for Having Taken Her Husband’s Last Name. Her Mother-in-Law Drops Off “Healthy Dyshes” Because Lina Eats “Poorly” (Again, The Food-Shaming!). Lina’s Acute Sensitivity to Such Assessments Stems From A Diflicult Past Shea Daken Pains to Leave Begind.

The Shadow of that Past Hovers Heavly Over a Scene Finds Lina Visiting Amalia (Jazmín Carblelo), an Old Friend Who Runs A Beauty Salon. The Mix of Wariness, Guilt and Ride-Or-Die Thot Passes Between the Two, The Sense of Debts Owed and Things Unsaid, is Haunting. In order to wash lina’s hair and body, Amalia sedates her; The Image of Our Protagonist, Gas Mask Fasted to Her Face, Asleep As She’s Surbed and Rinned Possesses An Almost Cronenbergian Weirdness.

There (pleasing and never Overtly Imitative) Hints of Hitchcock, ALMODOVAR and LYNCH, TOO, ESPECIALLY IN A GORGEUS MIDDLE SECTION THAT PLUGS US INTO LINAIDA. Ordinary Observations – Her Eye Is Drawn to How One Woman Nervousely Touchs The Back of Her Neck, How’s Another’s Skin Sags With Age – Give Way to More Bizarre Visions. Wandering A Labyrinthine APARTMENT AFTERING A FITTING, LINA WPON UPON A ROOM WHERE Kids in School Uniforms Lounge While Glved to Their Personal Screens. Later, During a One-on-One Meeting, She Imagines Her Assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) Standing Up Mid-Conversation and Throwing Herself Off The Balcony.

In a brilliant Touch that expans the Film’s Scope and Deepens It Meaning, Lina Also Sems to Experience A Sort of Telepathic Communion With Women Shee. Rich Client with The Rude Granddaughter Tours An Art Museum, Taking in The Elite-Skewering Etchings of Goya’s Los Caprichos; Julia, The Assistant, Has A Playful Romantic Encounter with A Neighbor; An Elderly Seamstress Lina have been works with rides the bus to choir Practice, WHERE SHES GREETED WARMLY BEFORE JOINING FRIENers in Song.

Set to the Sublime Ebbs and Flows of Gustav Holst’s The Planets (Specifically the Second Movement, “Venus, The Bringer of Peace,” with Its Mood of Hard-Earned Seren May Be Lina’s Saving Grace. WHEN she looks through a shop Window and SPOTS HER Exact Double Inside, The Dissociation Is Perhaps Less Pathological Than Symbolic Compassion As Shee Sees Others.

González-sala has a watchful, melancholy sensuosness that rewards close-up, an asset mumenthaler uses Thought Wisely Doesn’t abuse. With Discrette Camera Movements, Fluid Cutting and Supple Pacing, The Movie Coaxes Us Into Lina’s World – and Her Unsetted Psyche – Racher Than Yanking ALDING, HOLDING, HOLDING, CONVERSELY. The filmaking is precise and refined, But Free of the Self-Conscious Fastidioousness that of the passes for style on the International Festival Circuit.

The Currents Errs Only in the Final Act, Posing An Explanation for Lina’s State that Tips the Screenplay’s Delicate Balance of Elusivens and Legbility Too Far Town The Latter. Even that Flaw, However, Sems A Function of the Filmmaker’s Love for Her Character, Her Desire to Engage with Lina and Her Problems Rather Thran Treat Them As A vehcle for. It’s a forgivable Misstep: Not Realizing that An existential mystery this transfixing, this moving, dosn’t need to be solved.