A woman gazes out a window before heading to an event to receive an award. As the pleasantries die down, her smile fades, and she heads to the bathroom. Staring in the mirror, she throws the award into the trash. Spilling out into the streets, she finds herself at a bridge. Suddenly, she flings herself off of it, into the water.
These are the opening few minutes of Milagros Mumenthaler’s latest, The Currents. Conceived from an idea she’d had about a woman who’d thrown herself off a bridge for an unknown reason, and how this decision would alter the rest of her life. Opening in Geneva, then returning to Buenos Aires, where both Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), the woman, and Mumenthaler are from, The Currents swims in the contradictions of walking between worlds. Not limited to cultural contradictions, Lina’s incident awakens a desire to resist within her. Traditional roles of femininity, like motherhood or being a housewife, are pushed against, silently, as she drifts in and out of daydreams. A fear of water emerges as well. Lina is unable to take showers or hydrate, and a rash appears on her neck.
Explanations of these strange occurrences, even the inciting event, are withheld by Mumenthaler, who opts, instead, to unspool her story through shades of quiet surrealism. Always something of an elliptical filmmaker, Mumenthaler’s first in almost a decade, is a treat to lose yourself within. If you’re one to find yourself disassociating, maybe lingering on a thought just a few moments longer, the lull of The Currents will feel familiar. As Lina wanders through her life, answers never really reveal themselves. We might be given a bite here or there, but such is the complexity of life that we’re never really privy to why one does something out of the ordinary. We’re often even unaware of why we stumble into the unknown. A visual stream of consciousness, The Currents is Mumenthaler at her freest. A filmmaker who took time to let the story come to her, and after ten years, has delivered another strange, disarming masterpiece.
Ahead of its release, I sat down with Mumenthaler to discuss the film, stream of consciousness, and resisting as an Argentinian.
(Thank you to Annabella Tidona for translating)
Brandon Streussnig: It’s been almost a decade since your last feature. I know you’d spent a long time writing this one, so it wasn’t like you were just sitting around waiting for the next project. What compelled you to keep at this one for so long?
Milagros Mumenthaler: For me, it was a very harmonious process. During the 2016 Locarno premiere of The Idea of a Lake, I already had this project in mind. I’m also not one to rush. I don’t run. I don’t rush. It didn’t seem like anything was rushing me. I didn’t feel the urge to shoot this quickly.
In a way, I am half a housewife, and the other half of me is a scriptwriter and film director. So, I just took my time, and I feel that when you take your time, things just happen, and it comes from a much more genuine and authentic place. So, there was no rush in creating the structure of a script. I was not in a rush to find a resolution. Things would come by themselves. Adding to the housewife theme and being a mother, maternity, that takes time too. You want to be present for that.
BS: Motherhood is such an important aspect of this film, so much so that many of Lina’s disassociations are centered around her relationship to her daughter. She almost seems to resist strict ideas of femininity, whether it’s being a mother or a wife.
MM: Yes. The dissociation — clearly, we have this unraveling person. She went through this very severe episode in Geneva. It was an unexpected episode where the body speaks, the body talks. The body did something that the mind couldn’t do. Faced with this crisis, everything comes into question. I think all these things were brewing. They were there, but it’s like she was going through her life on autopilot, and she didn’t have time to stop and think. So, in the film, we can see this pace, and she’s moving forward to try to reach these goals.
Then, at some point, these goals don’t make sense to her anymore. They’re no longer goals to her. So, that’s when Lina takes distance from all of this. She had this very purposely, carefully built life. Things that she built in her life with lots of effort. She belongs to a different social class, so every decision was a fully conscious one to move forward in the life that she’s built. Then she’s questioning her own decisions. We all have only one life to live, and it’s really difficult to branch off and do something completely different when you have a child in tow. So, it’s really hard to just say goodbye to everything and imagine other possible lives.
She imagines these other possible lives that she can’t have. I think this is clear in the lighthouse scene, where she projects herself onto the lives of all these different women. All these different women, they’re doing very simple things, really small actions like being a part of a choir, or having the spontaneity of calling up a friend and meeting with your friend. I think it’s very telling. The fact that she cannot even imagine herself or bring herself to do these very small acts — that’s very telling of the state she is in.
BS: This episode that shakes her loose happens in Geneva, Switzerland, and then she returns to an altered life in Argentina. I find this fascinating because you also occupy both worlds. You fled Argentina for Switzerland as a child. How much of this was on your mind while writing Lina?
MM: I imagined this opening scene happening in Geneva, a woman jumping into the freezing water. When I imagined this character, I thought to myself, “This cannot happen in her everyday life.” This has to happen in a setting where she’s far away from all the people she loves, all the people she knows. Where she has free time to roam around, she doesn’t know what to do. Where she goes out for a stroll, and she lets herself go. There are no witnesses, there’s nothing to do in this setting, and this thing happens.
I also like the idea of the two nationalities, living in two different countries. In a way, it means that you don’t belong to either of the two places fully. It’s like you’re straddling these two countries. I think this notion somewhat indirectly informed our casting choice. We chose to cast Isabel because she’s Argentinian, but she has been living in Paris for many, many years. So, along with the casting director, we decided to cast her to play Lina in this movie. She can really bring this sense of distance. She’s at the edge of the abyss, but she also welcomes this distance.
What happens when you have a body that is somewhat exotic just by virtue of having lived so far away from Argentina? What happens when you put that body in Buenos Aires? There’s this distance, right? So, I think when you’ve lived in two different countries, the possibility of a change of life is more possible. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to project a different life.
BS: One of the ways you project this distance is through a visual stream of consciousness. I’ve never seen that captured so well on film, I don’t think. At least not in a way that mirrors the stream of consciousness in prose. The easy comp would be Mrs. Dalloway, but the way you displace us moment by moment feels so intentional. What was your approach to that?
MM: Yes, Mrs. Dalloway was, specifically for the lighthouse scene, a starting point, if you will. We see Lina in this very concrete moment, and I actually wrote lots and lots about her. I wrote about her childhood and what happened to her father. How she met Amalia, how she met her husband. What was it like the decision to leave her mother’s home when she made that decision? So I really delved into this character.
When I think about one of my films or one of my scripts, it’s always from the character: what she shows, how she perceives the world, and where she chooses to cast her gaze. Likewise, this also guided the mise-en-scène and how we thought out the sound. At the start of the film, there is a window, and this window takes us to the sound of a fan. I’m thinking this fan has a metallic quality to it. This sound, this noise, might be practically imperceptible to many, but she perceives it.
Many times, for example, she’s walking, and there’s a little bit of wind, and the wind might not seem like a big deal, but then we have a closer shot, and that reveals a stronger wind, or at least that’s her sensation. So, throughout the whole film, we follow how she is feeling internally, but we also have some other shots where they show a more objective reality, and at the same time, we can follow her internal reality.
BS: While I was watching this film, her resistance kept reminding me of the current reality of Argentina. This was made before the government seized control of the film industry, but its existence itself feels like an act of resistance. I wonder, how do you view the film now, against a time when it’s become much harder to make something like it?
MM: You’re correct, this type of film feels like an act of resistance. When we premiered the film, it did feel like an act of resistance in Argentina. It feels like an act of resistance faced with the reality of the streaming world. Cinema feels like a place of resistance, because cinema is a place where we can think, we can see other visions of other worlds.
The situation in Argentina isn’t good, obviously. Argentina is undergoing severe financial cuts in film, but I think all Argentinians are used to resisting. Argentinians have endured many crises before, and I think that sometimes a crisis can allow for important artistic manifestations.
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