There’s a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart’s accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you. Adapted from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is challenging material, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse followed by years of vanishing — into addiction, sexual experimentation and self-destruction before the author found her voice by channeling her pain into writing.
Stewart also appears to have found her voice, announcing the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance but with unimpeachable commitment to honoring her subject’s story.
The Chronology of Water
The Bottom Line
A radical pathway to wholeness.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Jim Belushi, Earl Cave, Tom Sturridge, Charlie Carrick, Kim Gordon, Michael Epp, Susannah Flood
Director-screenwriter: Kristen Stewart, based on the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
2 hours 8 minutes
That subject, Lidia, played by Imogen Poots in a daring high-wire act, represents not just herself and her fellow-survivor sister Claudia (Thora Birch) but countless women shamed into silence or damaged beyond repair by violations of their bodies. It’s a visceral, densely textured film, shot on 16mm and splashed with disorienting color washes and lens flare and light that obscures as much as it illuminates.
It cuts deep even while washing over you with soothing images of water, as the title suggests. “Come in. The water will hold you,” says Lidia at the end, which is exactly what the movie invites us to do, in ways that may be triggering, but perhaps also cathartic.
Dispensing with exposition, establishing shots and specific time indicators, and shooting much of movie in intimate closeup, Stewart shapes The Chronology of Water into a scrappy collage, almost like pictures pasted into a journal. The narrative is ragged and nonlinear but rendered as stream-of-consciousness poetry in Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s nervy and yet somehow liquid edit. Stewart and Poots thrust us into the molten core of Lidia’s experience, forcing us — with emotional candor rather than manipulation — to know her pain.
While the approach is entirely different, more than once I was reminded of Su Friedrich’s landmark 1990 experimental memoir film Sink or Swim, which reflects in a more detached but no less personal way on a young girl’s upbringing and her experience of emotional and physical abuse from an aloof, hard-to-please father.
Lidia’s father, Mike (Michael Epp), is the kind of firm-jawed, handsome man who looks like he just stepped out of a Brylcreem commercial. But his cruelty is on full display when he sits her down to read her college acceptance letters and rejects the half or three-quarter scholarship offers, all but gloating over her failure to secure a full ride. “If they don’t want you then you don’t belong there,” he sneers.
In her depiction of his abuse, Stewart shows sound judgment and maturity, keeping the sexual violence almost entirely off-camera. But it’s shocking, nonetheless.
In one scene, the family drives to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree. The young Lidia (Anna Wittowsky) waits in the car with her mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), who is absent even when she’s present and has perfected the art of not seeing. Mike instructs teenage Claudia (Marlena Sniega) to grab the saw and go with him. They come back to the car in silence, without a tree, and even with the fuzzy perception of a child, Lidia seems to intuit what took place from the deadened look in her sister’s eyes.
When she’s older, Mike warns Lidia about the disgusting things college boys will want to do to her. Corey C. Waters’ camera stays on Lidia through the whole conversation, keeping Mike outside the frame. But the words and sounds we hear make it clear that he’s touching her inappropriately, probably doing exactly what he says those imagined college boys will do, but in Mike’s case, he acts with entitlement.
Stewart makes extensive use of voiceover narration, which embraces the film’s literary roots while also endowing it with first-person immediacy. Lidia’s words guide us from her childhood in 1970s San Francisco through her escape from home via competitive swimming; the death of her Olympics dream when drugs and alcohol got her kicked out of a program; the flailing sexual excesses of her college years, flipping between men and women, slugging vodka from a flask that’s always with her and snorting endless lines of blow.
“My own drugs. My own sex. My own friends. My own freedom,” she intones like a mantra, trying to convince herself those are the keys to moving forward.
Long after Lidia’s swimming career fizzles, water remains inextricably linked for her with memory. But it also provides the means through which she can reach for whatever altered state she thinks will release her at any given moment — oblivion, erasure, salvation or a sense of self that remains elusive.
“In water, like in books, you can leave your life,” she says at one point. Later, when she has published her first collection of stories and won an award from Poets & Writers Magazine, she’s invited to give a public reading. The piece she chooses begins with a starter’s call at a race: “Swimmers, on your marks.” She goes on to describe wanting to emerge from the chlorinated water like something amphibious, without gender. But her tenuous self-confidence leaves her shaken, unable to absorb the compliments of organizers or audience, or to react to the interest of a publisher in seeing more of her work.
Her relationships run from saddening to toxic. Still trying to shut out the sound of her father’s voice, she allows herself to be charmed by gentle-natured, guitar-strumming folkie Phillip (Earl Cave, son of the musician Nick Cave), confessing that she treated him badly and wishes she could go back and apologize. She’s put off by his sweetness, his refusal to respond to her meanness and his unfailing encouragement, expressing pride in her tiniest recovery wins.
Even if Phillip’s niceness chafes, she asks him to marry her, which they do in a sweet, goofy ceremony on a beach. But when she gets pregnant, she goes to stay with Claudia, both sisters still carrying around the dead weight of their childhood legacy. The tragedy that results from that pregnancy yields a return to the same beach with Phillip in a funny-sad scene that lurches from awkwardness to wrenching loss.
In the wake of Phillip, Lidia takes up with the opposite of nice, Devin (Tom Sturridge), a cocky fuckboy who steers her into heavier drug use and slams her against walls in sex that seems more punishing than pleasurable, which is maybe what she thinks she needs. A relationship with a photographer played by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon gives her a taste of BDSM, her arms bound to her torso while she’s spanked hard with a paddle.
No matter how messed up Lidia gets, writing remains her life raft. A friend gets her into a creative writing workshop in Oregon with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. He’s played in a lovely turn by Jim Belushi as a rambling acid head, whose thorny charms give the movie a welcome lift. The group works with Kesey on his collaborative novel Caverns, and he’s quick to spot Lidia’s talent, his mentorship helping to steer her in the right direction.
But it’s when she starts teaching a writing class that hope and purpose and some kind of stability finally appear within reach.
Unsurprisingly, Stewart gets fine work from her actors, even those who appear only in a few fragments. Cave has the most fully developed secondary character and the most screen time, and he brings aching sensitivity to the kind of naïve young man who believes he can fix a broken person.
Birch also has strong moments, the misplaced guilt showing on her face over leaving years earlier to save herself and abandoning Lidia to their father. Inviting Lidia into her home and caring for her while she’s pregnant seems like the older sister’s way of atoning.
But Poots is the transfixing fulcrum around which the entire cloudy but still clear-eyed movie spins. Stripped to the bone and flayed by her ugly experiences, both during and for years after, Lidia is emotionally naked, unable even to ask for or accept help. For the longest time she appears to believe she’s a void, equipped solely to be that damaged girl from her childhood. It’s a remarkable performance.
The film’s running time stretched by almost 40 minutes between the first program details on the Cannes schedule and the premiere, and it must be said that its sheer intensity often becomes draining, to the point where you wonder who its audience will be. Further tinkering would help and appears a given, since it was rushed to Cannes pretty much straight from the lab. But whatever its future, it seems clear that Stewart has made exactly the movie she wanted to make, establishing a visceral connection with her subject and never letting go.
#Kristen #Stewarts #Bold #Directing #Bow
