Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.
A rewarding experimental art house indie adapted from the novelist Lidia Yuknavich’s transgressively visceral non-linear memoir, Stewart's first full-length feature as writer-director is filtered through the stream-of-consciousness of Imogen Poots’s Lidia.
The mosaicked narrative moves forward from an unfixed perspective. As the title suggests, it renders time a fluid entity, in which past, present, and future coalesce, water being a metaphor for the unconscious; it was, too, in the 17-minute short, Come Swim, that Stewart made in 2017. She cites John Cassavetes’s films and Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar as influences. Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective miniseries with its psychotherapeutic disassembling, imaginings, and flashbacks is an obvious precursor that Stewart might not have seen.
Its montages sometimes uncontrolled and overstuffed,The Chronology of Water buffets fragments of reality and reveries against teeming memories – some inaccurately recalled or re-shaped in Lidia’s mind. They show, with merciful haziness, her tyrannical father’s repeated rapes of her when she was a teen and her mustering of her will to keep him at bay; her sadistic training as a scholarship swimmer with Olympic hopes; and her flunking out of college because of her drug and alcohol addictions. (Pictured below: Thora Birch, left, and Imogen Poots)
Yuknavich’s stories are laced with joyful descriptions of S/M sex; Stewart shows Lidia visiting a BDSM photographer (Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon) who has a way with a healing lash. Body horror merges with body romance in this biting drama, Lidia’s subjectivity registering pleasure in pain and claiming the gaze.
Lidia’s baby with her passive folkie husband Philip (played by Earl Cave) is stillborn; she has affairs with women (Esmé Creed-Miles, Esmé Allen) and marries other men (Tom Sturridge, Charlie Carrick). She breaks down but, steely at core, recovers via writing and teaching. Avuncularly mentored in literary rule-breaking by Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon, Lidia reads a graphic passage she's written that recounts a degrading assault on her by her father. A repulsed fellow female PhD student bolts from the classroom; Kesey merely admires Lidia’s prose.
Stewart and editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm slow the film’s pace for the Kesey section, rationing quick cutting and jumps in time to preserve the integrity of Jim Belushi’s rousing portrayal of the rascally sage and to show that studying with him is a watershed moment in Lidia’s life.
A constant in it is her steadfast sister Claudia, who fled the family home when Lidia was still small to escape Dad’s rapes and bullying as their booze-zombified mom (Susanna Flood) looked on. Empathetic and world-weary, the grown Claudia (note-perfect Thora Birch) provides a haven for Lidia after she leaves Philip, the sisters’ consoling relationship paralleling the one in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.
The restraint and elusiveness that have defined Stewart’s film acting weren’t qualities she sought in Poots. Not that the British actress isn’t subtle, but early on especially in The Chronology of Water she’s full on and in your face – an emotional vortex, an electromagnetic provocateur, sister under the skin to Die My Love’s Jennifer Lawrence. Were they separated at birth?
Cinematographer Corey C. Waters, who filmed The Chronology of Water in 16mm, persistently and elliptically shot Poots in discomfitingly magnifying close-ups as she ran the gamut from feral, ecstatic, and shattered to self-knowing, serene, and put together. It’s the rawest of performances, one that’s seemingly more about “being” than pretending. Poots clearly trusted Stewart to guide and catch her Sturm und Drang as she unleashed it. They are talking of working together again. May lightning strike twice.
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