Lina, not Catalina: how even a change in name can seemingly transform your entire being comes to the fore in Milagros Mumenthaler’s gripping third feature, The Currents [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], which has just world-premiered in the Platform strand of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival and will soon head to the main competition of San Sebastián. The Swiss-Argentinian writer-director has already made a name for herself with films of a similar stylistic crypticity: her debut feature, Back to Stay [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Milagros Mumenthaler
fiche film], collected the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2011 and also went on to play at San Sebastián.

In the first few minutes of the movie, something compels 34-year-old fashion designer and stylist Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola, who plays the character’s emotional stillness with conviction; we feel as if we are staring into her soul) to jump into the freezing waters of a Swiss lake after receiving a prestigious award. Upon returning home to Buenos Aires, she acts like nothing has happened in front of her too-perfect husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and her young daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte), but she has secretly developed a paralysing fear of water.

As more than just a portrait of depression or induced apathy, The Currents never overshares the state of Lina’s mind, requiring us to piece together its emotional jigsaw pieces – much like Mumenthaler’s protagonist herself must as well. She heads to an old friend, salon owner Amalia (Jazmín Carballo), for a hair treatment in light of her aquaphobic inability to take a shower – digging up buried trauma along the way that stays bubbling, at a full boil but never explosive.

There is something off about this world that only Lina sees, hears and feels, jumping at several crucial times into a space that feels like a heightened reality – take, for instance, an imagined sequence involving her assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) and a peculiar, eerie shot of uniformly dressed children. This slightly distorted world is further crafted so carefully by many design choices – especially the sound, where seemingly muted background noises cut through and intentionally grate on the ear. Mumenthaler also uses the atmospheric woodwind and yearning violin leitmotifs of Gustav Holst’s “Venus” from his sweeping The Planets orchestral suite to repeatedly stir up a sense of disquietude that haunts Lina wherever she goes.

It is the director’s dedication to emphasising, in an unexpected way, how generational trauma manifests itself that ultimately emerges as The Currents’ strongest thematic throughline, as it examines Lina’s relationship with both her daughter and her mother. Mumenthaler avoids the overused narratives of emotional violence and trades them for a toolkit of emotional uncertainties – which manifest themselves in Lina’s inability to share openly or truly elucidate what her frozen plunge brought to the surface. Likewise, The Currents instils this unplaceable omnipresent malaise in one’s mind as a viewer, resulting in it lingering silently but immovably after the film’s final moments, as a reminder.

The Currents is an Argentinian-Swiss production by Alina Film and Ruda Cine. Luxbox holds the rights to its world sales.