A Spellbinding Argentinian Character Study

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 Mumenthaler.

Conjuring the troubled inner life of Buenos Aires fashion designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) with an uncommon mix of stylistic rigor and feeling, it’s a work of impressive, at times thrilling, 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 cinephiles, arthouse distributors and programmers alike.

Lina’s beauty and privilege — her flashy career, sleek apartment, successful spouse and adorable child — put her in the company of outwardly enviable, inwardly tormented female protagonists from Rosemary Woodhouse to Lydia Tár to whomever 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 Milagros’ Argentinian contemporary Lucrecia Martel. 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.

The movie’s 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 — snore — the moral rot eating away at modern society. That’s not to say this story of a woman whose flawless façade barely cracks even as her insides crumble doesn’t 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.

The Currents opens with 34-year-old Lina accepting an award in Geneva. Surrounded 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 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.

Lina 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’s mental wellness. But there’s a shiver of possessiveness in his bearing, something the filmmaker suggests through subtle means like a lingering glimpse of Pedro’s hand gripping Lina’s desk.

What nobody knows is that since Lina’s 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 — though Mumenthaler prudently doesn’t turn Lina’s furtive scratching and greasy hair into a body-horror gimmick, or box her into a story about a single phobia. Lina’s new fear is just the most 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 clack of a sewing machine, the bleeping of a video game), creating a cacophonous soundtrack that both echoes and exacerbates 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 eerie image of disembodiment.

Still, Lina continues to go through the motions at work and at home. Notably, she has turned neither frigid nor vampirically horny, reflecting the filmmaker’s 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’s 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.

Milagros tangles with this theme of identity, contemplating how it intersects with gender and class, 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 will wince in recognition of the blithe savagery — but devastating in how sweepingly it undercuts Lina’s most fundamental life choices.

Throughout The Currents, Lina is similarly 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 dishes” because Lina eats “poorly” (again, the food-shaming!). Lina’s acute sensitivity to such assessments stems from a difficult past she has taken pains to leave behind.

The shadow of that past hovers heavily over a scene that finds Lina visiting Amalia (Jazmín 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’s hair and body, Amalia sedates her; the image of our protagonist, gas mask fastened to her face, asleep as she’s sponged and rinsed possesses an almost Cronenbergian weirdness.

There are (pleasing and never overtly imitative) hints of Hitchcock, Almodovar and Lynch, too, especially in a gorgeous middle section that plugs us into Lina’s increasingly unmoored perspective. Ordinary observations — her eye is drawn to how one woman nervously touches the back of her neck, how another’s skin sags with age — give way to more bizarre visions. Wandering a labyrinthine apartment after a fitting, Lina comes upon a room where kids in school uniforms lounge while glued 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 expands the film’s scope and deepens its meaning, Lina also seems to experience a sort of telepathic communion with women she knows, picturing how they go about their days in her absence: The 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 has worked with rides the bus to choir practice, where she’s greeted warmly before joining friends 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 serenity), these fantasized peeks into other lives suggest a curiosity, a yearning for pleasure and connection that 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 — Lina finally having the distance necessary to see herself with the same clarity and, one hopes, compassion as she sees others.

González-Sola has a watchful, melancholy sensuousness that rewards close-ups, an asset Mumenthaler uses though wisely doesn’t abuse. With discreet camera movements, fluid cutting and supple pacing, the movie coaxes us into Lina’s world — and her unsettled psyche — rather than yanking us there or, conversely, holding us at a remove. The filmmaking is precise and refined, but free of the self-conscious fastidiousness that often passes for style on the international festival circuit.

The Currents errs only in the final act, positing an explanation for Lina’s state that tips the screenplay’s delicate balance of elusiveness and legibility too far toward the latter. Even that flaw, however, seems a function of the filmmaker’s love for her character, her desire to engage with Lina and her problems rather than treat them as a vehicle for provocation. It’s a forgivable misstep: not realizing that an existential mystery this transfixing, this moving, doesn’t need to be solved.