Writer/director Milagros Mumenthaler’s “The Currents” traces in powerful, unsettling detail the slow motion existential crisis of Argentinian fashion designer, 35-year-old Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) on the occasion of winning a coveted award. In the opening wordless minutes, in Geneva, Switzerland, smiling during applause, Lina receives a glass trophy, says nothing, next appears in the bathroom, vigorously washes her hands, and inexplicably throws the award into the trash. Immediately leaving the building, she walks across a courtyard, up dark stairs, across a deserted street, and stops at a store window, staring at an antique embroidery of women sewing. That in a package in her hand, Lina walks halfway across a bridge and, hastily and impulsively, jumps into the icy river below. Arriving back at her hotel with a gold space blanket over her shoulders, emotionless, no words are spoken as a lovely white swan fills the frame, preening her feathers. And the titles roll after this enigmatic prologue.
Home in Buenos Aires, Lina makes no mention of her breakdown, though husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and five-year-old daughter Sofia (Emma Rayo Duarte) comment on her unusual behavior. Her mother factors in as does Lina’s assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti). From that point on, Lina segues in and out of hydrophobia, inadequately coping, distracted at work and home, preoccupied without any explicit catalysts. Attempting to deal with her unnerving situation, Lina visits Amalia (Jazmíne Carballo), a hairdresser who aids Lina by giving her a message and using gas to induce unconsciousness.
Refusing to offer simplistic reasons, Mumenthaler explores a familiar, vague alienation that resists facile solutions or even an unambiguous explanation. Several suggestions factor in to her relationship with her mother, her husband, daughter, and colleagues. Suggestively, Lina wanders through what may be hallucinatory events, flashbacks, or surrealistic dreams. In a slightly jolting scene, in a visit to the National Museum of Fine Arts, a character singles out Jenaro Pérez Villaamil’s romantic 1842 painting “Explosion of a Locomotive,” metaphorically mirroring Lina’s splintering. Later, Julia explicitly comments on romantic sensibility as “a deep aspiration that’s necessarily mixed with frustration, and it’s in this empty space that romantic acts appear. I don’t know if they’re real or just an artifice to fill the void.” In that vein, Lina has fallen into a fraught, lonely space of her own, apparently unable to fathom it or shake off its hold on her. Initially alone in Geneva, Lina becomes immersed in the intensity of her professional and personal life in Buenos Aires, to no avail.
In press notes, Mumenthaler describes her exploration of “a woman for whom there would be no definitive answer to her behavior.” She credits Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” helping guide a “flow through the protagonist’s consciousness” with an ambiguity of meaning, that is, is Lina imagining events or is she “projecting herself onto them?” As partial explanation, Mumenthaler observes that Lina “can’t find where she belongs because she ran away from her origins . . . she stopped being Cata and became Lina” (called Cata by Amalia) after abandonment by her mother. Mumenthaler considers Lina “a contradictory character (like we all are, to some extent.)” Also “directly inspired by ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’” a significant scene occurs in the Palacio Barolo legendry lighthouse, another striking symbol as the finale ensues (no spoilers here). To its credit, “The Currents” leaves interpretation indeterminate. In Spanish with English subtitles, “The Currents” screens at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium Thursday, July 30, through Saturday, August 1, at 7:30 p.m. each evening. For more information: Webster.edu/filmseries