“Las Corrientes”, by Milagros Mumenthaler
She was far from home, both celebrated and isolated. She made an extreme, violent and disturbing gesture. Returning home – his city, Buenos Aires, his opulent family home, his fashionable stylist’s studio – it’s as if the lurch from the beginning continues, in a different way.
Lina drifts, all the more paradoxically as this movement is accompanied by a phobia of water. And the film stays with her, doesn’t seem to know any more than she does about what’s happening to her, possibly what happened to her in the past.
We perceive that she is a strong person and that, however, these “currents” that the title names slip through her, which perhaps come from her past, perhaps from the history of her country, Argentina, perhaps from a more obscure and more commonly shared process.
Las Corrientesthe third feature film by Argentinian-Swiss filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, after the magnificent Three sisters (2011) who revealed it and The Idea of a Lake (2016) unjustly remained unpublished, is an invitation to travel through emotions, alongside a person whose mystery thickens as the film progresses.
The mystery here is the opposite of the secret or the enigma, which has a solution, a resolution. And the mystery is the heart of what allows there to be cinema, really cinema. Over the course of meetings, conflicts, escapes, crossed images, this woman whose name is Catalina, who was formerly called “Cata” and who is now known as “Lina”, deals as best she can with what she experiences, with what bothers her.
And the direction of this other woman, Milagros Mumenthaler, accompanies her with a sort of tender and perplexed delicacy, a care of the direction which knows how to make itself sensitive to what a shadow produces in the mother’s house, the words and gestures of the energetic assistant, the return without a future towards the one who was at the center of another era of his life, an ancient embroidery discovered in a window.
What the Argentinian-Swiss filmmaker does is extremely unique, while being fully part of the extraordinary vigor and originality of what directors from her country offer, alongside, even if not together, these essential figures of contemporary cinema who are Lucrecia Martel and Laura Citarella.
More specifically, the cinema of Milagros Mumenthaler offers a particularly stimulating proposition of what a feminine approach to directing could really mean. Las Corrientes can in fact be seen as the opposite of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema, rediscovering its sense of dizzying dismay in the face of the inner abyss, but freed from the macho perversity at the heart of art, of the great art of Sir Alfred.
Rich in notes of deadpan humor, fantastic thrills and a sensuality in unstable balance which owes enormously to the interpretation of Isabel Aimé Gonzalez-Sola (Lina), impressively embodied in opacity, but also to all the other actresses, the film disrupts spectator habits.
It opens, without any major spectacular gesture, towards a new approach to the intimate for which we would find references in literature (Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, etc.), but not really on the screen. Las Corrientes is thus both a film “in minor” – as one would say of a piece of music – and a very important film. Important, in particular, to be in minor.
“The Dance of the Foxes”, by Valéry Carnoy
Violence of the blows exchanged, context of damaged adolescence, clashes and challenges between young roosters, on and off the ring, in an institution supposed to channel violent energy: the cinema has often shown such situations, we believe we are on familiar ground.
But in this rather strange place, an installation dedicated to the preparation of young sports adolescents in combat disciplines, which looks a bit like a castle, a bit like a school and a bit like a prison, other images intrude, other codes parasitize the announced program.
It will be the forest, which surrounds the place like in a story. In the forest, there will be foxes, of which the young boxer, Camille, is passionate about making images. It will be Yas, the young woman who does MMA and plays the trumpet. It will be this impressive and disturbing place, a concrete cliff like a haunted dungeon, from which you can see everything and from which you can fall.
For his first feature film, Belgian filmmaker Valéry Carnoy tells and films like his character boxing, with an energy that is not afraid to go beyond customs. Likewise, the appearance of Samuel Kircher, rather frail, very white skin, cute face, does not fit with the image of a young person who invests his life in boxing. So, this pain that he feels and that the doctors do not explain becomes the symptom of a disorder which runs through the film and allows it to function on several registers at the same time.
It is the strength of The Fox Dancethis momentum which is maintained while, like a boxer constantly changing support foot, axis and distance, he jumps from the fable to the initiatory novel, from the realistic chronicle to the fantastic thriller.
The film resembles its young hero, capable of hitting hard and yet fragile, attached to benchmarks (his friend Matteo and their group of friends for Camille, the cinematographic genres known for Valéry Carnoy) and capable of freeing himself from them. After a fierce fight, a sort of breakup and a fraternal gesture, the story ends in a way of “to be continued”, which also applies to the director.
“Precious(s)”, by Fanny Guiard-Norel
One of the most delightful situations in cinema is to discover a film which both fulfills the promise it held and turns out to be rich in other propositions, other sources of interest and emotion. This is the case with the documentary by Fanny Guiard-Norel, devoted to the work of Cécile Roy-Fleury, a teacher in a high school, who prepares with her students a staging of the Precious ridiculous (1659), play by Molière reviewed in the light of contemporary feminist questions.
Questioning the classics from this angle is a very legitimate practice, which has become common, as recently evoked in the film Victor like everyone elseby Pascal Bonitzer, and which is the principle of the piece The Women’s School (also by Molière), revisited by Frédérique Lazarini and currently at the Artistic Athévains theater in Paris.
The joint exploration of the text and its echoes, the putting into historical perspective and the search for possibilities to move it or problematize it, the joys and the pangs of the passage to the theatrical act for the students and their teacher nourish an adventure of the same emotional, intellectual and political movement.
Specialists from the classical period and feminist literature provide their insights. They discuss, they get confused, they revolt, they invent, they laugh. We rewrite Molière and understand him better. We move, literally and figuratively. It’s good. Theater is born.
But now other events concerning the teacher interfere, in an intimate and dramatic way. In a double movement, the story of an intimate physical injury and the accomplishment of a personal act of creation, the publication of Cécile Roy-Fleury’s collection of poetry, everything changes again. At the Parisian Jacques-Decour high school, rehearsals continue.
And little by little, these interferences make Precious
a story with unexpected echoes, painful and full of vitality, where the theater, the school and the home, the theatrical word and the body become boxes of multiple resonances.
The parentheses around the “s” in the title point to the singularity of this story, but also of the people, one by one today, while the dynamics circulate – itself with multiple possible insights – of a text written almost four centuries ago, played and studied without interruption since, questioned and in play today.
What is precious, in the high sense of the word, gradually appears as much as the memory of the courageous women who, in the century of Louis And of course, the teacher around whom this movement revolves, more extensive and complex than one would have thought.
