As an actor, Kristen Stewart brings a restlessly kinetic vitality to each position she performs; even when nonetheless, she nonetheless appears to be vibrating along with her personal depth. As a director, she infuses The Chronology of Water – an adaptation of an impressionistic memoir by cult author Lidia Yuknavitch, screening within the Cannes Movie Competition’s Un Sure Regard part – with that very same private electrical energy, blasting what may very well be a conventionally sequential biopic into splinters, shards and ripples that may be pieced collectively as we go. Or not, after all: these bits of reminiscence can merely be embraced in all their vivid, meticulously deliberate disarray. If it’s a biopic, it’s not like all you’ve seen earlier than.
Imogen Poots performs Lidia from her first scenes as a schoolgirl swimming champion to her eventual emergence as a author with a settled life: house, companion, little one and a desk with a view over water. Like Stewart, Poots is 35, however there may be by no means a second whenever you query her age within the position; it doesn’t depend on that sort of realism. What she brings to Lidia, because the abused little one of a bullying father and a completely sedated mom, is a conviction that has nothing to do along with her precise age. She appears like a youngster, depressing and determined for escape. She is the frayed twentysomething addict who will get carted away by paramedics. Simply as powerfully, she is a bereaved mom and a tormented, alcoholic virago who punishes her first husband Philip (Earl Cave) for being too good. She is in virtually each body and he or she at all times feels proper, her efficiency pulsing with urgency.
That urgency can also be constructed into the movie’s development. Every part is in fixed, pushed motion. Frantic enhancing ensures that scenes flash ahead and backward in time, typically inside a minute: these alternating pictures work like a visible metronome, ticking back and forth. Smaller sequences are damaged up with jolting soar cuts: simply the opening of an envelope, the work of a single second, consists of three cuts. The fingers across the paper transfer, are moved once more, then once more: rip!
Sounds, likewise, shock us by coming from wherever. An preliminary voice-over, apparently from Lidia’s writings, is discouragingly portentous – it does sound, actually, like teenage diary – however then we hear her father’s voice, intruding into her life from hundreds 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 little one is her sister Claudia (Thora Birch) who returns to her life when she is older, pregnant and needy. She remembers, within the bits of reminiscence that float by way of the narrative, that Claudia left in her teenagers “to avoid wasting her personal life”; she can be despatched to her room to offer her father (Michael Epp, terrifying) free rein to beat, harangue and in any other case abuse the sister who would later take her place.
Precisely what occurs to the ladies just isn’t detailed; intercourse scenes, aside from just a few disquieting bouts of joyless masturbation, are equally reticent. Stewart exhibits her characters largely in close-up, usually from odd angles: trying up at a chin, for instance, or coming in so shut {that a} single eye or the whorl of an ear fills the display. There are moments when it isn’t completely clear whose eye in in our sights, however the pictures are so transient it hardly issues. They’re all a part of the identical mosaic.
Lidia’s liberation from the previous – actual or, as she suggests in her voice-over, reshaped right into a narrative she is ready to personal – begins when she joins a school writing class in Oregon with Ken Kesey, writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like her, he began out as a school athlete, loves William Faulkner and believes in phrases past the rest. Like her, he brings a hip flask to class. He’s her kindred spirit however, extra considerably, tells her she’s a author. It isn’t a transparent street, but it surely’s her manner ahead. Stewart, studying the memoir that was the final word results of Kesey’s urging, clearly feels herself to be one other one among their tribe. She says she was solely midway by way of when she contacted Yuknavitch to ask if she may adapt it, then spent eight years writing one model after one other.
The movie she has made is concurrently uncooked and intricately constructed, as exact and doubtlessly perilous as a Jenga skyscraper. A lot visible and aural artifice may simply collapse in on itself, but it surely holds regular. On so many ranges, it’s to be admired. Stewart has efficiently discovered a type to match the spiky, visceral high quality of Yuknavitch’s prose, as evidenced by readings throughout the movie, and its major topic: trauma. It additionally maintains an unflagging help for a central character who is typically exhausting to bear. On the similar time, a lot technical complexity does create a way of distance from what we’re being instructed. We see what occurred to Lidia Yuknavitch, we perceive it, we admire Stewart’s artistry. The online impact, to be trustworthy, is a bit chilly.
Title: The Chronology of Water
Competition: Cannes (Un Sure Regard)
Director: Kristen Stewart
Screenwriters: Kristen Stewart, Andy Mingo
Forged: Imogen Poots, Thora Burch, Michael Epp, Earl Cave, Jim Belushi
Gross sales agent: Les Movies du Losange
Operating time: 2 hr 8 minutes
