Kristen Stewart’s left-turn after Twilight led to her becoming one of the most tasteful actors working today. Her list of auteur collaborators is the envy of others in her industry: Pablo Larraín (she earned an Oscar nomination for playing Princess Diana in Spencer), Olivier Assayas (the excellent fashion ghost story Personal Shopper), and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women) are just a few. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that, for her first foray behind the camera, she made something as ambitious and abstract as The Chronology of Water. On paper, it sounds like a bog standard memoir adaptation, one that would rely on easily-tugged emotional strings to do much of the heavy lifting. Instead, it feels like a film that rejects the expectations of those who might laugh off an actor shifting into the director’s chair.
After working on the film for almost eight years, it finally premiered tonight at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s been the subject of hearsay and rumours since it was publicly announced three years ago. In my opinion, she has little to worry about.
The film is based on a celebrated memoir
Stewart first reached out to secure the rights to The Chronology of Water nearly a decade ago, and got to work writing its script soon after. The book is written by, and based on the life of, Lidia Yuknavitch. When she was young, Yuknavitch was a star swimmer, but the discipline of her hobby, and the pressure of her abusive father, followed into college. She became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and was kicked out of her scholarship position. The film charts this journey, and how the spectres of her childhood continued to haunt her as she grew up and became a writer.
Like the book, it’s split into chapters
The film is split into five oddly-shaped chapters titled, in order: Holding Breath, Under Blue, The Wet, Resuscitations, and The Other Side of Drowning. In writing about the book, Stewart wrote that she was drawn to “its fragmentation: Yuknavitch doesn’t give you a tidy narrative, but instead hands you the pieces of a life in shards, demanding you assemble them yourself.” The film is loyal to that structure, charting the life of Lidia (played in the film by British actor Imogen Poots) in a series of interspliced images with sharp edges, shifting from grainy footage of swimming competitions and childhood flashbacks, to blood seeping across white tiles and stark scenes of her mental breakdown. It’s not tricky to follow, but it’s seldom taking the plain route.
Shot on 16mm, it’s an aesthete’s dream
Perhaps the most alluring feature of The Chronology of Water is how it looks. Shot on 16mm film (uncropped, so you get the rounded edges with touches of debris), the whole film looks soft and grainy, as if its characters are recalled from dreams or old memories. It was shot by Corey C. Waters, an American cinematographer who’s got lots of experiences shooting music videos for the likes of Troye Sivan and Moses Sumney. In a different era, almost every frame would have been screenshotted and GIF-ed to appear on Tumblr––not a bad thing, considering the story still has weight to it.
Fiona Apple and Kim Gordon make appearances
Though the film’s sound design stutters and clicks, filling nearly every second of available silence, the film has an interesting musical angle too. For one, Stewart has cast Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth as a minor character in the film. (Her part is modest but part of the film’s fascinating fabric.) You also get not one, but two Fiona Apple needle drops: “Regret” from The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw…, and “For Her” from Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
It’s a proudly ugly and absorbing portrait of trauma
If its visual language feels distinctly pretty, indebted to Stewart’s adoration for friends and past collaborators (Larraín and Sofia Coppola both get thank yous in the credits), the way the film deals with its central subject matter is the perfect opposite. Lidia’s path to recovery seems labyrinthine. Never straightforward, she struggles to escape from the domino effect of her past. Stewart knows there’s no point in making this seem attractive. It’s often plain and earnest. In an early scene, Lidia gives birth to a stillborn baby, her older sister cradling her body as she cradles her lost child. Later, she wades into the sea to spill the baby’s ashes into the water, and the tide pushes them back, sticking to the pockets of her wool coat.
Sex haunts and heals its lead character
Lidia’s past, and the sexual abuse she suffers as a child and young adult, are catalysts for how she approaches sex as a grown woman. The film looks at how it both haunts and heals her. In one particularly liberating chapter, Lidia explores her bisexuality, spending a weekend in the countryside with two female college friends. Her writing becomes explicit in a way that feels like it reclaims the language and her body from those who tried to claim it from her.
In a genre that generally steers clear of such muddied moral lines, the film feels proud of its ability to stand firm in the shoes of its broken protagonist. It’s a grandiose and interesting film that dares to take huge swings, and for the most part, hits the landing.