In already a big year for actors’ directorial debuts (Harris Dickinson with Urchin, Scarlett Johansson with Eleanor the Great), the move behind the camera that most intrigued me was undoubtedly Kristen Stewart, darling of auteurs from America to Europe, turning writer-director for The Chronology of Water. Adapting Lidia Yuknavitch’s relentlessly horrifying memoir, it’s a typically fearless move for Stewart that, unfortunately, marks a very disappointing start to her filmmaking career. Bold and confident and with a powerful central performance from Imogen Poots, it needed a far, far tighter edit, its jagged procession of miseries becoming nothing but numbing across a lethally overlong runtime.
Poots plays Lidia, a profoundly damaged young woman after years of the most unspeakable sexual and physical abuse from her father. She channels her trauma into further damage from drinking, drugs, and toxic relationships, but also the more healthy escapes of swimming (which lands her the college scholarship that frees her from her home) and writing, which will eventually become her career. Stewart flashes freely from past to present, Lidia’s memories intruding constantly, the fracturing effect of childhood abuse made manifest in the disorienting editing and bone-cracking sound design as certain moments repeat constantly while others are lost to the ether.
Poots (though honestly too old to convince as a teenage/college-aged Lidia) does solid work anchoring such a freeform story, oscillating from self-destructive rage to silent, internalised agony. The Chronology of Water is, for almost the entirety of its over two-hour run, miserable, heinous evils followed up by grave mistakes and cruel accidents of nature with almost no respite. It’s impressive how little Stewart shies away from any of the truth of Lidia’s breathtakingly dark life story, but the tonal single-mindedness is often more exhausting than affecting, especially in a final act (the film is broken up into five chapters) that just never, ever ends.
A few characters brighten things up when they’re first introduced (see: Jim Belushi having fun as novelist and mentor Ken Kesey or Thora Birch as Lidia’s also traumatised older sister Claudia), but they all also fall victim to Stewart’s unwillingness to be clinical in her cutting. Others (especially Tom Sturridge as a shitty boyfriend whose segment feels like it could have been excised entirely) actively contribute to the repetition problem which even Stewart’s half-immersive, half-abrasive style can’t distract from. Though the edit is a major problem, you can’t fault her confidence in content and form, all ragged and grainy as it moves through a broken mind.
The Chronology of Water is an impressively punchy and aggressive debut from Stewart as both director and writer (I can’t remember another film with this much violence and complexity of feeling towards vaginas in its dialogue), but it’s also too clearly a product of inexperience. Lidia Yuknavitch’s story did undoubtedly need a teller as bold (and, frankly, name-brand) as Stewart to make it to the screen uncensored, but it also needed one with substantially more discipline and experience in the edit room to land with the lingering power it deserves.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 