“I hate that look. Where have you gone?” Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) says to his wife Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) who he catches staring off into the distance as her laptop is open on the couch in “The Currents,” troubled by the idea her mind is elsewhere. She recently returned from Switzerland where she picked up an award for her work as an artist and hasn’t looked like the same person since, not entirely engaged with their young daughter (Emma Fayo Duarte) and absent when he tries to get romantic in the bedroom, willingly giving over her body to him but clearly keeping anything else to herself. He is right to worry about her, but as writer/director Milagros Mumenthaler shows so precisely his concerns all dripping with a certain self-interest when they reflect preserving the life he has rather than thinking about hers at all, something he may not be conscious of himself, but is part of his wife’s great discontent that is finally starting to affect him as well.
It doesn’t seem coincidental that Lina’s artistic practice involves dressing up other people when it increasingly becomes obvious that she’s invested her whole life in giving herself a makeover in Mumenthaler’s inventively perceptive third feature where the clothes finally start coming off. Transfixing from its very first shot in which a scene of Lina looking out onto the city sees its reflection ultimately obscure her, the film remains intimately inside of Lina’s perspective while presenting her as a bit of an enigma, opening the film without a line of dialogue as she curiously discards the prize she’s won in Switzerland in the bathroom of the building where the ceremony takes place as easily as the paper towel she’s just used to dry her hands. She is soon revealed wanting to wash her hands of everything as she plunges into a nearby river, but thinks twice about ending it all, returning to her native Argentina still without a word to her family, though as soon as she arrives home, silence isn’t an option when she is thrown back into the work of tending to her husband and child beyond the business she started herself in what most would consider a comfortable lifestyle, but she hardly feels cozy in.
Class gradually emerges as a fascinating part of Lina’s unhappy marriage when it doesn’t appear as if making her way from a more modest upbringing was a primary motivation in wedding Pedro, clearly having the cutthroat instincts to make a success of herself under any circumstances, but in visiting Amalia (Jazmín Carballo), a friend from the life she left behind, she misses the warmth of that world that she struggles to see in the clean, ultramodern home she has and as her daughter is glued to playing games on her iPad, a disconnect due to the readily available technology around the house can be frustrating. Beyond a strong performance from González-Sola whose placid demeanor as Lina belies a rich inner life, Mumenthaler taps into every cinematic tool available to her to convey a character who can’t express any of her emotions directly, often picking up an ambient sound or a canny composition that relays the relationship to the world she often feels trapped in.
Yet the filmmaker shows the most resourcefulness in rethinking a structure for such a tale of despair, having the story constantly curl around to suggest that things are not what they initially appear, though not in a way intended to deceive or surprise as any step forward in Lina’s routine can lead her back to thinking about the past, but instead to gain a hold on what Lina thinks she’s missing as she becomes conscious of it herself. There have been plenty of unhappy housewives plotting their escape on screen, a fact that Mumenthaler may even acknowledge when Lina conspicuously tells her assistant at one point who is afraid to pitch her ideas out of fear they might be repetitive that “Nothing is original. It’s the viewpoint that you bring.” Not only is it invigorating to watch Lina free her own mind from the ideas that brought her to where she is now, but to see Mumenthaler liberate herself from the way such stories have been told in the past, creating the foundation for a promising future for them both.