The Currents

Isabel Aimié González Sola

Milagros Mumenthaler's The Currents is a riveting portrait of a woman's mental disorientation. Isabel Aimié González Sola plays Lina, a chic designer who we see receive an award for her work in the opening scene. She thereupon bins the ugly trophy (see above) and takes a leap off the nearest bridge into the Rhine. The authorities are not too concerned with her and deposit her back to her luxury hotel. Lina travels back to her home in Buenos Aires, but her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and daughter, Sofia, both sense that she is preoccupied and distant. Her able assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) also gleans Lina's disconnection.

Lina leads an enviable bourgeois life. The film's display of stylish shoes, dresses lipstick, make-up, and hair treatments stands in contrast to Lina's emotional desolation. Pedro is a bit dim emotionally, but is well intentioned and a doting father. His parents are fabulously wealthy, their home a veritable museum. Lina's lineage remains a mystery till well into the movie and when we finally meet Lina's mother, the audience has more than a clue in regards to the source of Lina's discontent. 

The film is stylish and knotty, but not overly so. As one of the film's characters puts it, there is enough "artifice to fill the void." A light house scene in which Lina blanks out while we see other characters revel in ecstasy and community seems too artsy-fartsy to me, but the film, on the whole, does a good job showing something that often seems invisible. Ms. Sola gives us one of the year's most multifaceted performances. The psychic terrain of Lina is mapped out by Mr. Mumenthaler using Ms. Sola's body. This meditation on the female form presents thanatos rather than eros looming. A brief glimpse of the expanse of Lina's hair across the back of a couch achieves a keening sense of horror and mortality. Highly Recommended.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun's most successful and accomplished film to date. The 1980s inspired mise-en-scene from I Saw the TV Glow is repeated and elevated thanks to a first rate cast and knowingly cheesy special effects. Schoenbrun's themes of transgression, sexual fluidity, and dysmorphia are once again articulated, perhaps overly so. However, Schoenbrun's love for pop culture permeates and lifts the film. The artifacts of pop culture litter the film: 1980s horror film bespoke ephemera, KFC, and lots of brightly packaged candy. Sch💜enbrun 💙s them all, but she is ambivalent enough to fear what pop culture has done to our psyches and bodies. This is the Cronenbergian strain in their work and they toss in a Videodrome reference in acknowledgement.

Teenage Sex... is, of course replete with film references: Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Schoenbrun is savvy enough about her obsessive cinephilia to joke about an overly academic or meta approach to movies in the flick. Her surrogate in the film, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a rising queer indie filmmaker who wants to remake a beloved horror film of her youth. The final girl in that film was played by a young actress named Billy Presley who eventually disappeared from view. Now older and embodied by Gillian Anderson, she lives a reclusive existence living, holy Miss Havisham, in the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma film. The mousy and frigid Kris visits Billy to talk her into participating in the new film. Einbinder reins in her charisma nicely and has a winning rapport with Anderson that papers over the film's flights of fantasy. Anderson is transfixing in full diva mode, Norma Desmond with the voice of Bette Davis. 

Billy gets Kris to loosen, plying her with grass and candy and serving as a sex therapist for the uptight younger woman. Eros and thanatos are at the core of the movie: the monster at the bottom of the lake who comes out to murder campers has an air vent shaped head, a shout out to Silent Hill, and is named "Little Death." The film posits that all one has to do to gain agency is repossess the male gaze and then liberation and orgasms will follow. This aged voice says it ain't necessarily so. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is entertaining on its own terms, but is overly enamored with its own artifice. I also thought it was too long. The satiric scenes of Hollywood players are overly broad and not particularly funny, but Schoenbrun could not resist nibbling the hand that feeds her. Still, I value the personal vision that lies at the heart of the film even if I find it a bit naive. The flirting between a Kwik-Mart clerk and an oblivious Kris is the kind of little touch that uplifts a cockeyed genre film like this.

Sea Devils

Sea Devils is a relative clunker from Raoul Walsh. The film is based on a minor Victor Hugo novel, but Borden Chase's screenplay takes many liberties with Hugo, history, and geography. The film is set around 1800 as a state of war exists between the British empire and Napoleonic France. Napoleon and his chief cop, Fouché, figure in the threadbare espionage plot which binds together smuggler Rock Hudson and British agent Yvonne De Carlo. They are chiefly responsible for the void at the center of this picture. Hudson is terrible, but Yvonne De Carlo is really terrible. I was a fan of The Munsters when I was a tot, so I won't belabor the point, but it is puzzling since she is quite good later on in Walsh's Band of Angels. Anyway, Hudson has more chemistry with Bryan Forbes, playing Rock's wingman, than he does with Ms. De Carlo.

Hudson functions best when he gets to display courtly gentility towards his leading lady. In Sea Devils, Rock kidnaps and gags his leading lady. This is a role for Errol Flynn not Hudson. Hudson never seems at ease in action films, even as late as 1969's The Undefeated he looks uncomfortable in the out of doors. Rock was more adept, both vocally and physically, indoors, as in the tavern brawls in Sea Devils, urbane flirting with Doris Day and with the late, lamented Susan Saint James on McMillan and Wife. On balance, he was also not a good fit for period roles. Despite the film's title, the picture spends little time at sea. Most of the picture is salon intrigue with gorgeous sets by Wilfred Shingleton (Great Expectations) shot in sublime Technicolor by Wilkie Cooper (Seven Men From Now). A good drinking game for this flick would be to have a shot every time Rock takes off his shirt.

Rock Hudson and Yvonne De Carlo

The exteriors for Sea Devils were shot in the Channel islands and France. That coupled with the all UK supporting cast lends one to think that this was a case of the fading RKO channelling European profits into a European production. The supporting players are certainly better than the leads, especially Jacques Brunius as Fouché, Maxwell Reed, and Denis O' Dea. Bryan Forbes said he was "ludicrous in a ludicrous movie", but he was only half right. Perhaps producer David E. Rose wanted to recapture elements of such recent Walsh triumphs as Captain Horatio Hornblower and The World in his Arms, but this is a pale facsimile. One interesting echo is a carrier pigeon sequence lifted straight out of Walsh's Desperate Journey. I find it more of an example of Hollywood as an echo chamber than as proof of the auteur theory.