The Currents · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The image everyone comes away with arrives early: Lina at a window, high over the city, her own reflection sliding across her face until she is half-cancelled by the glass she is looking through. She is watching. She is also being erased by the surface she watches through. Milagros Mumenthaler builds The Currents out of that single gesture — a woman estranged from herself, present and vanishing at once — and if you want a companion for the film, the most useful one is Gilles Deleuze, who spent two books describing exactly this: cinema in which a person can perceive everything and act on none of it.

Deleuze splits film into two big weather systems. In the movement-image, someone sees a situation and does something about it; the action changes the world, and the cuts obey that chain. In the time-image, that circuit snaps. The character can no longer respond adequately to what she perceives, so she watches and endures, and we are left with time itself rather than time as the measure of somebody's deeds. The Currents stages the break with almost clinical purity. Lina throws herself from a Geneva bridge into the Rhône, survives, flies home, and tells no one. The one act big enough to reorganize a life is committed and then sealed off from every other character. What remains is a woman performing continuity while coming apart — Deleuze's seer (the voyant), an endurer who cannot become an agent. Isabel Aimé González Sola's whole performance is built on this: a placid demeanor over turbulence, suppression made legible without ever breaking. Watch her and you are watching the time-image find a body.

The film's sound is where the concept turns concrete. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns — moments where there is nothing to do but look and listen. Mumenthaler said she built the soundtrack from wind, water, and metallic noise to carry the crisis "from within," and that water is the tell. The Rhône does not stay in Switzerland. It threads under the placid Buenos Aires everyday as an acoustic signature, a second narrative track speaking the disturbance Lina refuses to say aloud. This is why the title matters more than a title usually does. Deleuze has a name for perception that flows, unanchored, carried on currents and drift rather than fixed to a perceiving subject: the reume. Las corrientes is a film literally organized as reume — and Mumenthaler externalizes it in her "flights of thought," passages that drift off Lina to follow other women, a consciousness-to-consciousness float she takes straight from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The camera stops belonging to one mind and moves through several, the way a current moves through many bodies of water.

The spaces do the rest. Those clean ultramodern interiors — the marriage, the fashion world, the well-appointed apartment — should read as security. Instead they press in. Deleuze would call them any-space-whatevers: emptied, over-ordered spaces that no longer function as settings for action, only as fields of pure feeling. Their order is the trap. And the editing, which reviewers describe as "constantly curling," returning to moments and re-framing them so first impressions prove false, is what Deleuze calls crystalline description — an image that composes its object and then quietly replaces it, so you can never settle which version was true. Meaning here accrues by revision, not exposition. Even color joins the system: Mumenthaler grades Buenos Aires as "an old, grey city" and reserves warmer notes for Lina, a colour-image that absorbs her psychic temperature into the frame itself.

Where does this come from, and what does it move? The obvious ancestor is Jeanne Dielman — Akerman's durational, frontal woman inside domestic architecture, placid routine hiding rupture. Mumenthaler inherits the surface-interior dissonance whole. But she does something Akerman's fixed frame refused: she lets the construction flow and curl, swapping rigorous stasis for a fluid, Woolfian mobility of attention. Cléo wandering Paris through mirrors is the other tributary — reflection as the externalized map of a woman's crisis — and Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours supply the water, the single-day drift, the involuntary surfacing of the past. Mumenthaler's own earlier films taught her the grammar: the watchful fixed frame of Back to Stay, the image-first recursion and lake motif of The Idea of a Lake. The Currents fuses these into one instrument.

Its significance is quieter than a revolution and more durable than a trick. It takes the oldest melodrama in the book — the unhappy woman inside a comfortable house — and rebuilds it without a single melodramatic beat, refusing confession, breakdown, or catharsis. The crisis never becomes an event you can diagnose; it stays weather, form, sound, a reflection thickening on glass. That is the time-image doing genuinely contemporary work: an interior emergency rendered as perception rather than plot. Go back to that opening window. Lina is looking out at a city, and the glass is quietly taking her face. Once you have watched the whole film, you understand that the shot was never obscuring her. It was showing you precisely how much of her is already somewhere else, moving with the current.