Words by JANE CROWTHER
No bodily fluid is left untouched in Kristen Stewart’s raw, unflinching poem to wetness, adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Adapted (with Andy Mingo) and directed by the actor with Imogen Poots as Stewart’s front-of-camera proxy playing Lidia, it charts the non-linear, tortured path of a girl who is sexually abused by her father and finds sanctity in the chlorinated depths of her school swim team. Her prowess in the pool is what sets her free to some degree, taking her away from a somnambulist mother and her father’s fingers to college where sex, drugs and the healing power of writing led to pregnancy, addiction, self destruction and the redemption of art. And always there is immersion in water: in baths, lakes, pools, showers, rain. ‘In water, like in books,’ Lidia intones in one of many overlapping, murmured voiceovers offered like dream-state remembrances, ‘you can leave your life.’
Told in four chapters, it explores the legacy of trauma, the physical/emotional pain of losing a child, BDSM and the difficulty and release of becoming an artist. A writer from childhood, Lidia’s confronting prose finds purpose when she joins a writer’s class with author Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) at the University Of Oregon. But can she trust an older man who values her work? Or is he another predatory male? And does the sweet college boy who becomes her partner (Earl Cave) deserve the disdain she literally spits in his face?
Impressionistic yet graphic, The Chronology of Water shows a woman experiencing all her body is capable of: female ejaculation, excretion, birth, orgasm, destruction. And It seems that Stewart pours all of the teaching she’s gained from the dazzling array of filmmakers she’s worked with as an actor into the production of a woozy, elemental, bruising mood piece that is like its protagonist; messy, unbridled, in need of structure. Stewart has described her film presented to Cannes as a ‘first draft’ and in that regard it could use some corralling; but equally, like Lidia, it shows fierce potential. As Kesey notes, ‘you can write, girl’.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography courtesy of Scott Free Productions
The Chronology of Water premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
