THE CURRENTS (NYFF 2025) – Review by Margaret Barton-Fumo
Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents is an ambitious, at times convoluted feature, one that often reflects the complexities of women’s inner lives. Opening in Switzerland, where fashion designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) is the subject of a chic award ceremony, Mumenthaler signals almost immediately that something is awry when Lina goes into the bathroom and promptly tosses her new award into the trash. She then wanders the city aimlessly, stops to make a purchase in a shop and pauses briefly on a bridge before jumping into the water below.
Lina survives her plummet into the river and returns home to Buenos Aires without mentioning the incident to anyone, let alone her white collar husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi, who some viewers will recognize from 2023’s The Delinquents). She goes about her life somewhat normally, hiding a newfound phobia of water, which forces her to come up with creative workarounds to avoid bathing and washing her long, thick hair. Fortunately, Mumenthaler doesn’t patronize us with an easy explanation as to why Lina jumped, but rather presents us with a woman who is clearly unhappy in spite of seemingly ideal circumstances. Here the work of Chantal Akerman comes to mind, and her particular aptitude for portraying the common melancholy of the everyday woman. As The Currents goes on and we learn more about Lina and her past, potential reasons for her depression begin to emerge, but these come across as details in the fabric of her life, rather than clues that indicate some great mystery. Like many women who go about their daily lives with depression, Lina feels unmoored, telling her therapist that she is trying not to “feel so ephemeral.” Every moment she is in danger of roaming away from her established lifestyle, if it weren’t for her young daughter, who effectively serves as her anchor.
Continuing with the overarching theme of the “currents,” the film itself wanders off several times, apparently swept away in favor of passing characters or storylines, which often focus on other women. The camera will suddenly act as if distracted and stray its attention away from Lina. Usually accompanied by grand swells of orchestral music, these sequences are a bit overstated, with idealistic intentions. Kudos to Mumenthaler for playing with the medium and daring to link Lina’s story into a larger community of friends and strangers, creating a fascinating portrait of a bustling Buenos Aires in the process.
The nature of Mumenthaler’s perspective is consistently observational, going so far as to mimic the path of the human eye, following Lina closely one minute and an interesting pair of legs crossing the street the next. She also likes to show us people observing, like a woman enjoying artwork in a museum or Lina admiring a piece of embroidery through a shop window. In a scene that initiates a “currents” sequence, jumping from character to character, Lina and her daughter sit in the observation room of a lighthouse at the top of their apartment building and look at the people down below, enjoying a temporary omniscience while swathed in light.
Mumenthaler’s vision is compelling; she is an artist and a feminist with a promising career ahead of her. Isabel Aimé González-Sola gives a powerful performance and will hopefully continue to act in more features. There is a wealth of talent coming from Argentina’s film community lately and Mumenthaler’s The Currents is a welcome addition.
