The Currents begins with a curious, impulsive act. Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) is being recognized for her work in Switzerland when, suddenly, she completely disassociates. She can’t absorb the applause or adulation. Lina walks out of the event and wanders over to a bridge, allowing herself to fall into the water below. The motion seems involuntary, no contemplation in her movements. It seems almost as if she was pushed, but there’s no one around her when it happens. And once out of the water, she returns home to Argentina a different woman. Lina can no longer tolerate the sound or feeling of water––she can barely even look at it. When her daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) takes a bath, Lina refuses to be in the bathroom with her, too anxious to interact with a full tub of water.
“I took a bath by myself because you didn’t come,” Sofia tells her mother. When her father, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), arrives home, he drains the tub. He can immediately tell something is wrong, but initially finds himself unable to broach the subject. Meanwhile, Lina’s phobia begins to disrupt every aspect of her life. In the mornings, she can’t bear a shower or wash her hair. The sound, look, and feel of water fills her with dread. As she seeks out help from a woman of her past, the distance between her and her identity as a wife and mother grows. A younger self emerges from this fracture of identity––the girl she was before marriage. We learn that before Pedro, she was not Lina, but Cata: a young woman with a modest, dysfunctional upbringing. Her husband’s love, money, and overall influence transformed her into a stylish, authoritative woman of means. But now, when she’s with her daughter, Lina fantasizes about jumping off the balcony of her posh apartment.
Writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler paints an intimate portrait of a woman trying to reckon with her fractured identity, trying not to fall into the grip of madness. Mumenthaler understands that motherhood requires an element of performance that reminds the mother that her life is no longer hers alone. Though the love for her daughter is still there inside, she cowers from it, preoccupied with inspecting the current shape of her life. In therapy, Lina expresses a fear of water’s power and the strength of a current that could wash her away. It’s as if she now knows the fragility of her existence, and that the confidence that once governed her was washed away when she jumped off the bridge. Despite the eccentricity of her fears, the emotions behind them are painfully relatable to any woman who feels that the inertia of her life has taken over.
Cinematographer Gabriel Sandru gives The Currents the look of a painting in motion, focusing on the textures of fabric, skin, hair, and water. The film’s score has a grandness to it, heightening the psychological melodrama behind everything we see. Sola is revelation as Lina, a woman who tries to keep it all inside but betrays her own stoicism with the expressiveness of her eyes. Though more subtle in its intentions, The Currents is reminiscent of films like Tully and this year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: films that look at motherhood with sentimentality stripped away, examining what it means to have a child and lose oneself in the process.
Can a mother feel whole while a piece of herself is living under her care? And what of the woman she was before the labels of “wife” and “mother” overtook her? Is it cruel for a mother to be mysterious to her child? These are questions The Currents addresses thematically while never providing a clean answer. It’s through such ambiguity that we eventually arrive at our own private truth. Mumenthaler doesn’t want to give us the answers––she just wants us to wade through it and find our own way to shore.
The Currents screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival.
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