Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kristen Stewart
Starring: Imogen Poots, Jim Belushi, Thora Birch, Charlie Carrick, Susannah Flood, Esmé Creed-Miles, Earl Cave, Kim Gordon, Tom Sturridge, Michael Epp
Like her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart decided that having experienced blockbuster filmmaking at the start of her career she would spend the rest of her time working with filmmakers she admired. Her post-Twilight years have seen Stewart collaborate with such names as David Cronenberg, Woody Allen, Olivier Assayas, Pablo Larraín and Kelly Reichardt. We've long wondered if Stewart might have been "doing a Brady Corbet" and studying these filmmakers up close in anticipation of making her own switch to directing.
Stewart has made that leap by adapting Lidia Yuknavitch's 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water. But as a nascent filmmaker, Stewart's methods suggest she's less influenced by the modern directors with whom she has collaborated and more by experimental arthouse cinema of the 1960s and '70s.
The actress's debut as writer/director is so infused with the spirit of that counter-culture era that you would be mistaken for thinking that's the very time in which her film is set. That it actually takes place between the early '80s and early 2000s says a lot about how our idea of period is shaped as much by camera stock and filmmaking techniques as by costume or production design.
Stewart shoots on 16mm with the ragged edges purposely left visible in the edges of the frame, a cinema-as-punk-rock choice that lets us know we're for an assaultive experience. Imogen Poots plays the role of Lidia, whom we first meet as a high school graduate who hopes to earn a swimming scholarship to a top college. She desperately wants to leave home and escape her long abusive father (Michael Epp) and her zoned-out alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood), and that opportunity arrives when she is taken on by a Texan community college.
Lidia finds that no matter how hard she tries to numb the pain and erase her memories with a destructive combo of sex, drugs and alcohol, her childhood trauma continues to haunt her. This ruins her first marriage as her young husband (Earl Cave) is such a nice guy that she simply can't relate to him. With her view of men distorted by her father's abuse, Lidia experiments with lesbianism, and at one point develops a sub-dom relationship with an older photographer (Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon).
Discovering she possesses a talent for writing, Lidia decides that rather than trying to outrun the past she will own it through her words. Her writing is so brutally honest and confrontational that it proves unpalatable for most, but it attracts the attention of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' author and counter-culture figurehead Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). The author becomes an inspirational father figure for Lidia, who collaborates with Kesey, along with other students, on the 1989 novel 'Caverns'. But when this chapter closes and Kesey exits her life, Lidia begins to slip back into a pattern of self-destruction.
Five minutes into Stewart's debut and alarm bells might start ringing. Initially it may seem as though we're in for a collection of film school clichés as Stewart bombards us with piercing music and sound effects, grainy handheld images and abrasive editing. But it quickly becomes apparent that Stewart knows exactly what she wants to achieve with this confrontational collage. There is method to what can seem like madness at first glance. Stewart uses this uncomfortable style to evoke Lidia's state of mind, and rather than explicitly showing Lidia's childhood abuse on screen (something nobody wants to see), Stewart conveys the violence through her editing and sound design, punctuating cuts with the sound of a slap. Stewart borrows Dennis Hopper's technique of transitioning between scenes by intercutting the final frames of one scene with the opening frames of the next. In Easy Rider, Hopper used this technique to suggest that destiny was catching up with his anti-heroes; here Stewart employs it to evoke Lidia's apprehensions regarding what lies ahead. It's deployed brilliantly in a scene where Lidia considers approaching Kesey for the first time, Stewart and editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm cutting between a nervous Lidia studying Kesey form afar and the pivotal encounter she's about to subsequently experience.
If Stewart's directing is inspired, her screenplay isn't quite up to the same standard. She often resorts to Lidia reading passages from her work in voiceover, something that always comes off as fake. Listening to an actor add import to a line they've rehearsed multiple times just doesn't have the same impact as discovering it on the page for yourself. Movies about writers are best leaving their words unspoken.
But that doesn't detract from what is an impressive debut that suggests Stewart is a genuine filmmaker rather than an actor simply feeling it's about they time they had a go at this directing lark. Along with her impressive command of filmic language and how to subvert it, she has coaxed arguably career best performances from both Poots and Belushi. Eschewing any make-up trickery, Poots convinces as both the teenage and thirtysomething Lidia, and Stewart uses the actress's flesh to map out her journey of self-destruction, her camera lingering on bloody thighs and the imprints of bathroom tiles on a knee. Lidia seems like just the sort of rebellious young woman who might get tattooed, but she doesn't need such adornments; life's dirty needles have left enough of an imprint on her body.
The Chronology of Water is in UK/ROI cinemas from February 6th.
