There’s a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart’s achieved first characteristic as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of reminiscence and the uncooked wound of trauma so vivid it’ll at all times be with you. Tailored from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is difficult materials, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse adopted by years of vanishing — into dependancy, sexual experimentation and self-destruction earlier than the writer discovered her voice by channeling her ache into writing.
Stewart additionally seems to have discovered her voice, asserting the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance however with unimpeachable dedication to honoring her topic’s story.
The Chronology of Water
The Backside Line
A radical pathway to wholeness.
Venue: Cannes Movie Pageant (Un Sure Regard)
Solid: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Jim Belushi, Earl Cave, Tom Sturridge, Charlie Carrick, Kim Gordon, Michael Epp, Susannah Flood
Director-screenwriter: Kristen Stewart, based mostly on the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
2 hours 8 minutes
That topic, Lidia, performed by Imogen Poots in a daring high-wire act, represents not simply herself and her fellow-survivor sister Claudia (Thora Birch) however numerous girls shamed into silence or broken past restore by violations of their our bodies. It’s a visceral, densely textured movie, shot on grainy 16mm and splashed with disorienting coloration washes and lens flare and light-weight that intentionally obscures as a lot because it illuminates.
It cuts deep even whereas washing over you with soothing photos of water, because the title suggests. “Are available in. The water will maintain you,” says Lidia on the finish, which is strictly what the film invitations us to do, in methods which may be triggering, however maybe additionally cathartic.
Meting out with exposition, establishing pictures and particular time indicators, and capturing a lot of the film in intimate closeup, Stewart shapes The Chronology of Water right into a scrappy collage, virtually like photos pasted right into a journal. The narrative is ragged and nonlinear however rendered as stream-of-consciousness poetry in Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s nervy and but someway liquid edit. Stewart and Poots thrust us into the molten core of Lidia’s expertise, forcing us — with emotional candor reasonably than manipulation — to know her ache.
Whereas the method is totally completely different, greater than as soon as I used to be reminded of Su Friedrich’s landmark 1990 experimental memoir movie Sink or Swim, which displays in a extra indifferent however no much less private manner on a younger woman’s upbringing and her expertise of emotional and bodily abuse from an aloof, hard-to-please father.
Lidia’s father, Mike (Michael Epp), is the type of firm-jawed, good-looking man who seems to be like he simply stepped out of a Brylcreem business. However his cruelty is on full show when he sits her all the way down to learn her faculty acceptance letters and rejects the half or three-quarter scholarship provides, all however gloating over her failure to safe a full experience. “In the event that they don’t need you you then don’t belong there,” he sneers.
In her depiction of his abuse, Stewart exhibits sound judgment and maturity, conserving the sexual violence virtually totally off-camera. Nevertheless it’s surprising, nonetheless.
In a single scene, the household drives to the woods to chop down a Christmas tree. The younger Lidia (Anna Wittowsky) waits within the automobile along with her mom, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), who’s absent even when she’s current and has perfected the artwork of not seeing. Mike instructs teenage Claudia (Marlena Sniega) to seize the noticed and go along with him. They arrive again to the automobile in silence, and not using a tree, and even with the fuzzy notion of a kid, Lidia appears to intuit what passed off from the deadened look in her sister’s eyes.
When she’s older, Mike warns Lidia in regards to the disgusting issues faculty boys will need to do to her. Corey C. Waters’ digital camera stays on Lidia via the entire dialog, conserving Mike exterior the body. However the phrases and sounds we hear make it clear that he’s touching her inappropriately, in all probability doing precisely what he says these imagined faculty boys will do, however in Mike’s case, he acts with entitlement.
Stewart makes intensive use of voiceover narration, which embraces the movie’s literary roots whereas additionally endowing it with first-person immediacy. Lidia’s phrases information us from her childhood in Nineteen Seventies San Francisco via her escape from house by way of aggressive swimming; the demise of her Olympics dream when medicine and alcohol bought her kicked out of a program; the flailing sexual excesses of her faculty years, flipping between women and men, slugging vodka from a flask that’s at all times along with her and snorting limitless traces of blow.
“My very own medicine. My very own intercourse. My very own buddies. My very own freedom,” she intones like a mantra, attempting to persuade herself these are the keys to transferring ahead.
Lengthy after Lidia’s swimming profession fizzles, water stays inextricably linked for her with reminiscence. Water can be the place she will be able to think about herself in no matter altered state she believes will quiet her tormented thoughts — oblivion, erasure, salvation, purification, transformation, or simply merely having the ability to really feel a way of self, which stays elusive.
“In water, like in books, you possibly can depart your life,” she says at one level. Later, when she has printed her first assortment of tales and gained an award from Poets & Writers Journal, she’s invited to provide a public studying. The piece she chooses begins with a starter’s name at a race: “Swimmers, in your marks.” She goes on to explain desirous to emerge from the chlorinated water like one thing amphibious, with out gender. However her tenuous self-confidence leaves her shaken, unable to soak up the compliments of organizers or viewers, or to react to the curiosity of a writer in seeing extra of her work.
Her relationships run from saddening to poisonous. Nonetheless attempting to close out the sound of her father’s voice, she permits herself to be charmed by gentle-natured, guitar-strumming folkie Phillip (Earl Cave, son of the musician Nick Cave), confessing that she handled him badly and needs she might return and apologize. She’s delay by his sweetness, his refusal to answer her meanness and his unfailing encouragement, expressing satisfaction in her tiniest restoration wins.
Even when Phillip’s niceness chafes, she asks him to marry her, which they do in a candy, goofy ceremony on a seashore. However when she will get pregnant, she goes to stick with Claudia, each sisters nonetheless carrying across the lifeless weight of their childhood legacy. The tragedy that outcomes from that being pregnant yields a return to the identical seashore with Phillip in a funny-sad scene that lurches from awkwardness to wrenching loss.
Within the wake of Phillip, Lidia takes up with the alternative of good, Devin (Tom Sturridge), a cocky fuckboy who steers her into heavier drug use and slams her in opposition to partitions in intercourse that appears extra punishing than pleasurable, which is perhaps what she thinks she wants. A relationship with a photographer performed by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon provides her a style of BDSM, her arms sure to her torso whereas she’s spanked arduous with a paddle.
Irrespective of how tousled Lidia will get, writing stays her life raft. A pal will get her right into a inventive writing workshop in Oregon with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest writer Ken Kesey. He’s performed in a beautiful flip by Jim Belushi as a rambling acid head, whose thorny charms give the film a welcome carry. The group works with Kesey on his collaborative novel Caverns, and he’s fast to identify Lidia’s expertise, his mentorship serving to to steer her in the correct route.
Nevertheless it’s when she begins instructing a writing class that hope and objective and a few type of stability lastly seem inside attain.
Unsurprisingly, Stewart will get nice work from her actors, even those that seem solely in a number of fragments. Cave has probably the most absolutely developed secondary character and probably the most display screen time, and he brings aching sensitivity to the type of naïve younger man who believes he can repair a damaged particular person.
Birch additionally has robust moments, the misplaced guilt exhibiting on her face over leaving years earlier to save lots of herself and abandoning Lidia to their father. Inviting Lidia into her house and caring for her whereas she’s pregnant looks as if the older sister’s manner of atoning.
However Poots is the transfixing fulcrum round which your entire cloudy however nonetheless clear-eyed film spins. Stripped to the bone and flayed by her ugly experiences, each throughout and for years after, Lidia is emotionally bare, unable even to ask for or settle for assist. For the longest time she seems to consider she’s a void, geared up solely to be that broken woman from her childhood. It’s a exceptional efficiency.
The movie’s working time stretched by virtually 40 minutes between the primary program particulars on the Cannes schedule and the premiere, and it have to be stated that its sheer depth usually turns into draining, to the purpose the place you surprise who its viewers can be. Additional tinkering would assist and seems a given, because it was rushed to Cannes just about straight from the lab. However no matter its future, it appears clear that Stewart has made precisely the film she needed to make, establishing a visceral connection along with her topic and by no means letting go.