The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler, 2025)
This was the last of a three movie day towards the end of the festival and I was keen on having a lean-back experience no matter the film. But by the end, the film had clawed in and it continues to gnaw at me each time I close my eyes.
A study of the onset of unease. This isn’t plotless but it does prod at the limits of narrative for good reason. Isabel Solas as Lina is hypnotising and her scanning gaze seems to break the fourth wall as though she’s demanding we view the normal as absurd. The writing is restrained but not illegible. Most of the dialogue is given to the supporting cast as they busy themselves trying to snap Lina back to ‘reality. But Mumenthaler and Solas are so good at constructing a bubble that by the end we’re in it. Also helps that Sandru alternates between shooting this with a cold detachment (the jump, in bed, the shower) and close intimacy (at her work, day dreaming) to great effect.
Feels like post burnout clarity of an inexplicable kind where, when asked by those around us to explain ourselves, all we can muster is ‘umm, I don’t know how to say this…’ before we trail off to test the limits of various inadequate metaphors.
Hits all the right spots as I’m voluntarily unemployed now, the reason being, ‘umm, how do I put this…’ I’ve been scrounging for clues, therapy, parents, partner, work, world and I’m left with something that’s lesser than the sum of all these parts. Nothing’s really ‘happened’, or perhaps everything has, a shift, and it’s as though an anamorphic installation locks in, comes into full view. Except the anamorphic thing is just gaping negative space.
There’s this bit in Paterson where the lead notices twins or doubles everywhere he looks. Paterson’s just a bus driver play acting as a poet (perhaps the other way around) and this act of paying attention to the world, the world that is so easy to miss when we’re under the trance of routine existence, is understood as an act of conferring beauty and exacting meaning. It’s a quaint notion urging us to believe in the fact that right now around us beauty, art, the world abounds and all it needs is an interpreter and an audience.
The Currents feels like the opposite. It’s not beauty that abounds about beckoning poetry. Instead consider reality a tapestry with few loose skeins fluttering awaiting notice. One little tug and reality might unspool (think the ‘deja vu’ glitch in the matrix). But the crucial similarity remains: art might be the only way to approximate some sense of it all.