As an actor, Kristen Stewart brings a restlessly kinetic energy to every role she plays; even when still, she still seems to be vibrating with her own intensity. As a director, she infuses The Chronology of Water – an adaptation of an impressionistic memoir by cult writer Lidia Yuknavitch, screening in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section – with that same personal electricity, blasting what could be a conventionally sequential biopic into splinters, shards and ripples that can be pieced together as we go. Or not, of course: those bits of memory can simply be embraced in all their vivid, meticulously planned disarray. If it is a biopic, it’s not like any you’ve seen before.
Imogen Poots plays Lidia from her first scenes as a schoolgirl swimming champion to her eventual emergence as a writer with a settled life: home, partner, child and a desk with a view over water. Like Stewart, Poots is 35, but there is never a moment when you question her age in the role; it doesn’t rely on that kind of realism. What she brings to Lidia, as the abused child of a bullying father and a permanently sedated mother, is a conviction that has nothing to do with her actual age. She feels like a teenager, miserable and desperate for escape. She is the frayed twentysomething addict who gets carted away by paramedics. Just as powerfully, she is a bereaved mother and a tormented, alcoholic virago who punishes her first husband Philip (Earl Cave) for being too nice. She is in practically every frame and she always feels right, her performance pulsing with urgency.
That urgency is also built into the film’s construction. Everything is in constant, driven movement. Frantic editing ensures that scenes flash forward and backward in time, sometimes within a minute: these alternating shots work like a visual metronome, ticking from side to side. Smaller sequences are broken up with jolting jump cuts: just the opening of an envelope, the work of a single second, includes three cuts. The fingers around the paper move, are moved again, then again: rip!
Sounds, likewise, surprise us by coming from anywhere. An initial voice-over, apparently from Lidia’s writings, is discouragingly portentous – it does sound, in fact, like teenage diary – but then we hear her father’s voice, intruding into her life from thousands of miles away, haunting and unnerving. Or we hear her pencil, amplified to fill the room, as she scribbles in her notebooks with such urgency that she breaks the lead.
Lidia’s lodestar as a small child is her sister Claudia (Thora Birch) who returns to her life when she is older, pregnant and needy. She remembers, in the bits of memory that float through the narrative, that Claudia left in her teens “to save her own life”; she would be sent to her room to give her father (Michael Epp, terrifying) free rein to beat, harangue and otherwise abuse the sister who would later take her place.
Exactly what happens to the girls is not detailed; sex scenes, apart from a few disquieting bouts of joyless masturbation, are similarly reticent. Stewart shows her characters largely in close-up, often from odd angles: looking up at a chin, for example, or coming in so close that a single eye or the whorl of an ear fills the screen. There are moments when it isn’t entirely clear whose eye in in our sights, but the shots are so brief it hardly matters. They are all part of the same mosaic.
Lidia’s liberation from the past – real or, as she suggests in her voice-over, reshaped into a narrative she is prepared to own – begins when she joins a college writing class in Oregon with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like her, he started out as a college athlete, loves William Faulkner and believes in words beyond anything else. Like her, he brings a hip flask to class. He is her kindred spirit but, more significantly, tells her she’s a writer. It isn’t a clear road, but it’s her way forward. Stewart, reading the memoir that was the ultimate result of Kesey’s urging, clearly feels herself to be another one of their tribe. She says she was only halfway through when she contacted Yuknavitch to ask if she could adapt it, then spent eight years writing one version after another.
The film she has made is simultaneously raw and intricately constructed, as precise and potentially perilous as a Jenga skyscraper. So much visual and aural artifice could easily collapse in on itself, but it holds steady. On so many levels, it is to be admired. Stewart has successfully found a form to match the spiky, visceral quality of Yuknavitch’s prose, as evidenced by readings within the film, and its primary subject: trauma. It also maintains an unflagging support for a central character who is sometimes hard to bear. At the same time, so much technical complexity does create a sense of distance from what we are being told. We see what happened to Lidia Yuknavitch, we understand it, we appreciate Stewart’s artistry. The net effect, to be honest, is a bit chilly.
Title: The Chronology of Water
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Director: Kristen Stewart
Screenwriters: Kristen Stewart, Andy Mingo
Cast: Imogen Poots, Thora Burch, Michael Epp, Earl Cave, Jim Belushi
Sales agent: Les Films du Losange
Running time: 2 hr 8 mins
