The Currents · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Currents is a sustained exercise in the time-image: Lina is not a protagonist who acts but a seer who cannot translate her rupture into speech or movement. Her suicide attempt — the film's hinge event — occurs early and is then withheld from every character around her, so that the drama becomes pure duration: watching someone carry an invisible collapse through the unchanged routines of a successful life. Gabriel Sandru's cinematography materializes this estrangement through opsigns and sonsigns — pure optical-sound situations where looking replaces action, and the unseen event leaves its weight on every composed surface that follows. The film's emblematic opening, in which Lina's reflection partly obscures her own face as she gazes out over a city, is not metaphor but method: the image presents a woman who cannot see herself whole, and the camera will spend the next hour and forty minutes honoring that opacity. Mumenthaler's ultramodern domestic interiors deepen this logic — their antiseptic order reads as any-space-whatever, disconnected from warmth or habitation, architecture that offers no friction against which a sensory-motor response might form. The debt to Lucrecia Martel — Nuevo Cine Argentino's other great anatomist of bourgeois suffocation — is audible in the disciplined non-melodrama and the preference for texture over incident; but where Martel's La Ciénaga fills the frame with heat and restless bodies, Mumenthaler strips the household to its silences, making concealment itself the dramatic form.