Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Currents
2025 · Milagros Mumenthaler · The Currents on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Lina's reflection slide across her own face. (staging)
The opening image doubles Lina in a window, her reflection partly canceling her face as she looks out over the city, present and half erased at once.
Payoff: This tells you before any dialogue that she is watching her own life from outside it, unable to act on what she sees. In the reading: voyant / the seer. The reading calls a person who can only watch and not act the seer, the voyant Deleuze names in the time-image.
Listen for wind, water, and metal instead of music. (sound)
Mumenthaler builds the track from wind, water, and metallic noise rather than a conventional score, using pure sound to carry Lina's unspoken crisis.
Payoff: The sound carries what Lina will not say aloud, water threading her Geneva crisis into her everyday Buenos Aires life. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. The reading calls these pure sound situations, made only to be heard, what Deleuze names sonsigns.
Notice how empty and orderly Lina's apartment looks. (setting)
The sleek, ultramodern rooms of her marriage and work should read as secure, but the emptiness and order press in on her rather than comfort her.
Payoff: The order of these rooms is the trap, not the safety they should offer.
Watch Lina hold her composure through ordinary conversations. (performance)
González Sola plays her with a placid demeanor that never breaks, even as the household and the marriage quietly become traps around her.
Payoff: Her stillness is doing the opposite of what it looks like: holding together while she comes apart.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the reflection in the opening window, and how often Lina is framed half erased.