Kristen Stewart has acted for so many distinctive auteurs in the decade since the Twilight wrap-up that perhaps it was inevitable she would herself step behind the camera at some point. Her directorial debut The Chronology of Water is exactly the kind of project that might once have tempted her as a performer: an adaptation of a literary memoir (by Lidia Yuknavitch) centred on a muddled, self-harming young woman in desperate search of some purpose and affirmation. We meet this Lidia first as a child, within the framework of a 1960s household made tense by domestic violence; as a teenager, she takes to swimming, thereby internalising all the pressures of a solo competitive sport. When she finally reaches womanhood, embodied by Imogen Poots, she finds her mastery in the pool doesn't apply to dry land, lorded over as it is by the tyrannical men around her. The bulk of this story will outline how Lidia Yuknavitch navigated towards a place of acceptance, happiness and tranquility, a process that proves far from straightforward, and indeed far less straightahead than the average swimming lane. For much of that duration, she's having to outswim - or simply drown out - the negative voices inside her own head. The Chronology of Water will eventually run to a full two hours and eight minutes, which instinctively feels at least a reel too long, but in some ways it needs to be, because what it's detailing isn't an easy fix; like its heroine, the movie can seem tough and hard work.
For starters, you'll simply have to sit with Olivia Neergaard-Holm's free-associative editing, with its (achronological) premonitions of events to come: it's possible Stewart was seeking to emulate Nic Roeg while also intending to conjure a deeply mixed-up headspace. (We're waiting for both film and protagonist to settle down somehow.) Expect sudden swells of turbulence, then, but Stewart also affords us two constants we can cling to whenever matters get especially choppy. The first is the water of the title: the pools Lidia passes through ("how many miles does it take to swim to a self?"), the sweat and sexual effluvia, the ice in the drinks of her (alcoholic?) mother, the spit Lidia contemptuously deposits on the men she hoped might degrade her, the piss stain on one passed-out boyfriend's trousers, the condensation into which our heroine draws smiley faces (for a long time, the only happy faces in the film), the ocean into which she tosses the ashes of a stillborn baby with a muted, quietly devastating "sorry". The water raises up the film's largely floating imagery; it's both running motif and artistic self-justification. And within these emotional high tides, Stewart pins down another, adjacent image: that of the rocks Lidia habitually slips into her pockets on her travels, although it's initially unclear whether she means to ground herself - rocks as markers of time and place - or use them to drown herself à la Virginia Woolf.
The other constant here is Poots, an actress who seems to have been on the fringes of a Winslet-like movie stardom for a decade or more without really getting there. In hauling Poots front and centre, Stewart empowers her star to try things she hasn't before: to play brittle and unsympathetic, to frig herself and flash her boobs, to drink too much and drive too fast, to be as unpretty as this story demands at any given moment. In embracing these tasks, Poots creates the conditions where we cannot ignore this character, hard to be around though Lidia is, liable though she is to hurt herself and those who love her. In passing, Stewart also hands Thora Birch a gentle comeback role as Lidia's understandably concerned sister, and gifts Jim Belushi his best role in decades as the author Ken Kesey, who served as some sort of mentor for Lidia Yuknavitch's creative undertakings. (A sly comment on how fucked-up this moment was in general: we used to let someone as dishevelled as Ken Kesey mentor our young folk.) This is not, on the whole, a movie that wants or solicits the audience's approval, which likely explains why Chronology evaporated without trace within days of its UK theatrical release. (I suspect its maker had her fill of making nice during her teen franchise days.) Yet it demonstrates more than enough steel, a wilfulness its prime mover doubtless absorbed from her more adventurous directors, to be both admirable and promising indeed. Stewart has the makings of a proper filmmaker, just as the past few years have confirmed her as a formidable performer.
The Chronology of Water is now available to rent via the BFI Player and Prime Video, and on DVD via the BFI.
