Rookie director mistakes mute the effect of a powerhouse lead performance in “The Chronology of Water,” actress-turned-director Kristen Stewart’s feature filmmaking debut.
It’s an unblinking, in-your-face movie of the memoir by Lidia Yuknovich, which has developed a cult following thanks to its frank depiction of making art out of a childhood of abuse and adult life of trauma, addiction and sexual experimentation.
But while one can understand Stewart and her star’s Imogen Poots’ enthusiasm for the writer’s truth, Stewart’s decision to begin her movie by assaulting the viewer for the better part of the entire first act is blunder one.
We’re thrown into the maelstrom of Lidia’s youth and its adult consequences with blurry nudity in the water and images of blood in the pool which was our future writer’s first dream of glory — competitive swimming — and the bullying, “control” and sexual assault by her father (Michael Epp).
It’s graphic and more gross than shocking fever dream of an introduction, and lacking context we’re instantly in over our heads as viewers in a way intended to mimic how shocked and overwhelmed the child and teen Lida must have been.
But Poots’ voice-over narration, a filmmaking crutch often leaned on to suggest “writerly” subject matter, especially in the movies of novice filmmakers, is half-mumbled in the early scenes and that interior monologue dogs the movie from beginning to end.
Set in California, Texas and Oregon, the film is displaced in space and time thanks to the fact that it was filmed in Latvia and Poots plays Lidia from her late teens into her late 30s. When she meets the mentor who would give shape to her budding writing career — “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author and lifelong “merry prankster” Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) — we’re on more solid ground about the “where” and “why” if not the “when.”
The abuse of Lidia and her older sister Claudia started early, and the narrative connects us to the aftershocks of trauma to come by showing a recklessness in very young Lidia (played by Anna Wittowsky). A bicycle riding lesson sees her take her hands off the handlebars to “escape” pervert-bully Dad’s control and even injure herself.
His support for her swimming ambitions is just an opportunity to put her down when colleges only offer partial scholarships and “not a’ full ride.” If one lesser Texas school hadn’t approached her, she might never have escaped the creep. “Free” but stoned, drunk and promiscuous with both male and female classmates, she flunks out.
That’s how she follows her fellow escapee — her sister (Thora Birch) to Oregon where her diary-keeping fuels her new ambition. “I want to to write ‘The Sound and the Fury.'” And she’ll do it either as a memoir or a based-on-her-real-life novel.
Professor Kesey sees something in her and allows non-student Lidia into his class/workshop to create a group-written novel.
Go forth, he tells his charges between puffs on a student-rolled joint. “Write some bizarre sentences!”
Stewart wisely keeps all her focus on Poots in “The Chronology of Water,” and the “Frank & Lola,” “French Exit” and “Green Room” alumna does not disappoint. Poots makes even the pretentious passages of voice-over narration, “the yielding expose of a white page” and “I am a woman who talks to herself in lies,” feel lived-in.
As Lidia, she exults in teen triumph in the pool and mourns her stillborn first child from a premature marriage to a passive, sensitive would-be “James Taylor” singer/songwriger (Tom Sturridge).
Epp is perfectly vile as father Mike, whose wife their mother (Susannah Flood) drinks to pretend she doesn’t see the humiliation and sexual assault going on under their roof.
Whatever emotional connection adapter/director Stewart felt for this memoir, she got into the the spirit of the thing in cinematic terms. The book’s notoriety partly came from the naked woman photographed for the cover, and Stewart flirts with exploitation more than once — graphic scenes of Poots shaving to swim and drawing blood, masturbating inspired by the abuse, dabbling in S&M “submission” and teen swimmers facing public corporal punishment by taking a swat on their swimsuited bottoms for every pound they’re “over weight” from their unseen sexist brute of a coach.
Stewart shot the bottom-swatting in a way — girls poking their butts out for “punishment” — that would have gotten any male director canceled to Tristan da Cuhna.
Praised to the heavens in the rareified air of film festivals, “The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her thexploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual abuse, sex, nudity
Cast: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Michael Epp, Susannah Flood, Tom Sturridge and Jim Belushi
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kristen Stewart, based on a memoir by Lidia Yuknovich. A The Forge release.
Running time: 2:08
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