She lies turning away: A review of The Currents
by Aksharaa Agarwal
One might presume to think long and hard about The Currents. Confrontation and interiority are always ripe for provocation. The title itself sounds charged. Anticipation of some rushing, all-upending sweep. The thing about disappearing though, is it doesn’t happen with a burst of spectacular fits. It’s so prolonged, quiet, consuming. Not what one would expect, but obvious once established, The Currents is Milagros Mumenthaler’s portrait of a vanishing. The language of this dissolution sets itself up with the ease of silence. Words omitted, we open to a sequence that follows Lina astray in a foreign city. She’s here, then there. We observe her quick unsentimentality, and we must note it, for it forecasts her inner climate. She charts an aimless course, but still arrives, at the bridge over the lake. Approaching the water, one might mistake this moment for a pivotal one.
It’s that old question though: if no one is around for the falling of the tree, does it still make a sound at all?
There is no time for shock and there will be no explanation. The idea of singular events altering the course of a life is one that Mumenthaler seems to be challenging audiences to rethink. Is an altercation an intervention, does alteration render significant? Dismissing the typicality of emotional rumination, we remain on the outside, where Lina turns away from both incident and impact; to say nothing of the idea that her affectation as a result may be a manifestation of some inner turmoil. She’s at a cusp, a slippage. Take the temptation to succumb out of the equation, and resistance is no longer a triumph. This is also a malady. No melodrama. Just a Venn diagram of abstract expressionism, minimalism and (sur)realism. No alarms, no surprises. Painting a flux of a still life, Isabel Sola as Catalina is the perfect surface: equal parts stoic, blank-slate, projection-target and potent, weary restraint. It just so happens that a troubled thread runs through her experience as a daughter and mother. Is it erasure or embrace? ‘There’s a play between the images and what’s being told, narrated,’ Mumenthaler has said. One can only try to read the leaves.
With a lens trained on a time-lapse, she has documented a shifting terrain. A post-occurrence abstraction in which everything is fine and still, off. Where being lost can lead to a destination, disassociation can be determination and denial can be discovery. The eponymous currents themselves seem more a mirage than anything else. The core is muted mutation and emptiness. As such, the images themselves are not frenetic, terse or compacted. They are almost meaningless, faces, reflections. Nor do they luxuriate in exuberance. Aiming not for investigation, immersion, expression or entertainment, wedged instead in the spacious suspension of between, which is expansive. The simulation of a fracture of self from self-observation, a turn inwards, away. ‘You… have this distancing thing where you’re observing your life, and it becomes difficult to make sense of,’ as Mumenthaler has commented. A way unfolds, a way for dealing with themes of identity, isolation, social performance and personal history without sensationalising any of it. Bare, digressive, an almost defiant-by-default ambiguation.
Something happens, but it cannot be put into words. It can only be sensed, experienced. The Currents‘ strongest achievement is in its withholding. This makes possible the immediacy with which something indescribable is immediately coherent. Dislocation is still transportation, and it seems safe to let yourself get carried away. An answer to chaos. Unhealthy as it is, Lina’s faux rehabilitative disregard for what she did is serenely calming.The overall effect, as must be true of plunging in the deep oneself, is amiably anaesthetizing.
The Currents is screening at Sydney Film Festival.