When well-known actors resolve to strive their hand at filmmaking, the outcomes might be — and infrequently are — unremarkable by design. Timid and protected with a community TV aesthetic that screams “I’m much more afraid behind the digicam than I’m in entrance of it.” Not so of Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water.” Not within the slightest. Some motion pictures are shot. This one was directed.
Which isn’t to counsel this aggressively fragmented adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir needs to be graded on a curve as a result of its well-known auteur dared to movie on 16mm, and even as a result of she had the ability required to adapt her supply materials with the identical febrile porousness that made it such a placing piece of literature within the first place (a course of that required the “Clouds of Sils Maria” star to invent her personal language of elliptical ideas and excessive close-ups). Quite the opposite, I solely make notice of the laziest presumptions that folks would possibly create for Stewart’s debut due to the visceral fearlessness with which she defies them.
There isn’t a single millisecond of this film that doesn’t bristle with the uncooked vitality of an artist who’s discovered the permission she wanted to place her entire being into each body, messy and shattered as that is perhaps. And it’s largely for that motive why “The Chronology of Water” works even when it doesn’t: As a result of, on an virtually subatomic stage, Stewart communes with the liquid spirit of a lady who solely grew to become entire by permitting herself to dissolve into the smallest essences of her being — over and over till it appeared unattainable she would possibly ever regain a recognizable form.
As Lidia places it: “In water, like in books, you may go away your life.” And writing, like swimming — which she aspired to do on an Olympic stage till medication and alcohol put the kibosh on all that — turns into one other physique for her. It’s a metamorphosis that Stewart depicts with a refreshing lack of metaphor, as her script, a constellation of scattered quotes and half-invented recollections, all however literalizes how Lidia (Imogen Poots) disassociates from her sexually abusive father in Nineteen Seventies San Francisco.
At one level towards the tip of the movie, a chic transition makes it seem as if Lidia’s pores and skin is being washed away by a receding wave. As a rule, nevertheless, “The Chronology of Water” opts to anchor its visible poetry within the extra primal phrases of Lidia’s narration. Molested after one of many movie’s uncommon snippets of swimming, Lidia tries to masturbate the ache away. “All I assumed was my very own wide-open cunt was as open as a mouth screaming,” she says earlier than awing at her personal skill to ejaculate. Minimize to: Lidia drawing a smiley face with the condensation from an airplane window, as water involves characterize freedom from ache in three alternative ways throughout the span of a single sequence.
Stewart palpably delights within the button-pushing frankness of all of it, and in exposing so lots of the issues that ladies are informed to maintain hidden (lots of them significantly much less enjoyable than an orgasm), however her confrontational zeal all the time runs second to the fluidity of her feeling. That proves essential to the move of a linear however extremely permeable movie that strikes ahead by time like water by a fishing web, catching no matter actual or invented recollections are sufficiently big to get caught within the mesh.
There aren’t any establishing photographs, no time-identifying title playing cards, and solely a handful of snippets that final lengthy sufficient to be described as a scene; one minute Lidia is screaming at her school boyfriend for being too good, as if he ought to have intuited that she solely understood love by the veil of abuse, and the subsequent she’s enduring one among life’s hardest moments along with her older sister (Thora Birch) at her facet. There she is on the College of Oregon, the place “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” writer Ken Kesey (a fantastically forged Jim Belushi) teaches her that “shit floats, however cream rises.” And there she is writing her personal stuff, newly empowered to make one thing extra of her trauma than her trauma has wished to make of her.
All of it proceeds so as, as a result of “A chronology comforts us that we could quickly get to an actual place,” however the movie’s jagged stream of blunt zooms, arduous cuts, and kaleidoscopic colour swatches make it appear as if that place should be invented — a way of self that Lidia will equally must piece collectively from 1,000,000 damaged shards. A lot is fabricated from the notion that Lidia is inventing her personal fact, and that a few of what we see won’t be rooted in what Werner Herzog would possibly name the accountant’s actuality. “Recollections are tales,” she says on the very begin, “so that you higher provide you with one you may stay with.” Additionally: “When there aren’t any phrases in your ache, let your creativeness change what you understand.” Stewart doesn’t make any distinction between truth and fiction, which solely rankles in that we don’t know how Lidia is permitting that change to happen, however Poots’ exceptional efficiency is so grounded in fact it most likely wouldn’t matter if we did.
“The Chronology of Water” can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and but Poots makes each second of it ecstatic in its immediacy. It’s the way in which her eyes slim on the sight of one thing she needs, and the way in which she spits the phrase “household” by her tooth like a curse, and the way in which her entire physique shudders with laughter throughout probably the most darkly comedian second of Lidia’s total life on a seashore along with her first husband; Poots makes each look, transfer, and gesture really feel as alive with feeling because the pores and skin in your legs if you first bounce right into a swimming pool. “You may inform lots about an individual from seeing them within the water,” Yuknavitch wrote in her guide, however Poots brings the identical revealing depth to all the things she does right here — nothing is hidden, and even the lies are true.
The honesty of her efficiency seems to be a security web for a film whose heroine’s feelings are so large, and her ideas so visceral, that typically it looks like there isn’t any room for our personal. The sheer depth that Stewart endows into each beat creates a wave-less rhythm that may make it arduous to experience the peaks and valleys of Lidia’s story, and there are stretches of the film the place I felt prefer it was taking all my power simply to tread water. However Poots makes a lot appear doable simply by staying afloat, and Stewart’s movie — buoyed by her radical dedication to her personal voice as an artist — permits “The Chronology of Water” to exalt in all the things that bubbles as much as the floor.
Grade: B+
“The Chronology of Water” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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