(Kristen Stewart, USA, 2025, 128 minutes)
"It's all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations…"
Kristen Stewart's full-length debut, an empathetic adaptation of The Chronology of Water, adheres to the fragmentary form of Lidia Yuknavich's 2011 memoir, a recollection of the incidents that shaped a troubled and ultimately joyous life, but not always in chronological order (it follows Stewart's 2017 short Come Swim). It isn't, after all, how we remember things, and both book and film play like a swarm of vivid memories.
They aren't Stewart's memories, but after eight years and 500 drafts of the screenplay, she must have felt as if she had earned joint custody.
Much like RaMell Ross's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys and Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, even individual sequences are fragmentary, since DP Corey Waters often skews the 16mm compositions.
Instead of full-frame bodies or faces, he captures parts of the whole, frequently emphasizing texture over shape. It's a sensual approach, though so intimate it can prove disorienting until the fragments take fuller shape and start to cohere thanks to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm's intricate work.
The film begins with a stillbirth. Lidia's older sister, Claudia (Thora Birch), comforts her as she (Imogen Poots) processes a loss she associates with water–she associates everything with water–because Lidia is, or was, a competitive swimmer. As she crumples to the shower floor, and as the water continues to flow, blood that once sustained a life now runs down the drain.
One minute, she's an adult, and then she's a child with an alcoholic stay-at-home mother (For the People's Susannah Flood) and an abusive architect father (German actor Michael Epp, convincing as a native Pacific Northwesterner). Swimming is something she's good at, and it's also an escape. Other coping mechanisms include journaling, collecting rocks, and re-reading her sister's copy of Vita Sackville-West's St. Joan of Arc.
Since the fragments are so brief–even more so than the book's short chapters–sporadic voiceover provides an internal monologue; an expression of Lidia's feelings rather than a delivery system for exposition. Composer Paris Hurley, who provided the score for Rose Glass's pulpy thriller Love Lies Bleeding with Stewart, contributes to the sense of unease and discomfort.
Lidia's dad, who recalls Jon Hamm on Mad Men, is a handsome creep; a reminder that not all sexual predators are unattractive men who can't hold down a job; they exist, too, but this kind is more likely to get away with it.
Claudia leaves home as soon as she can, leaving Lidia defenseless until she goes away to college. For all her mother's faults, the real-life Yuknavich extends little sympathy to an unhappy woman who suffered from crippling depression compounded by a painful disability, a philandering husband, and an unsuccessful battle with the bottle. Lidia and Claudia deserved better to be sure, but Dorothy did, too, and her options were even more limited.
For Lidia, her mother's native Texas--Austin rather than Port Arthur--represents freedom, but left to her own devices, she develops an insatiable appetite for sex, drugs, and drink; a problem for any young person, but especially an athlete on scholarship. She also falls for Phillip, an aspiring musician, who tells her, "It's my father and my brother who have the real voices" when she compliments his singing–a bit of an inside joke, since he's played by Earl Cave, the son of Nick Cave (if anything, he is a better singer).
Phillip is a good guy, but all Lidia knows is bad guys, so she keeps fucking up, but he has an inexhaustible capacity for forgiveness, and he becomes her first husband. There will be others after that relationship runs aground, as well as relationships with women, including a college friend (Esmé Creed-Miles), transgressive novelist Kathy Acker (not featured in the film), and an older dominatrix (nicely played by post-punk musician Kim Gordon).
By the time Lidia ends up at the University of Oregon, where Ken Kesey (an excellent Jim Belushi) becomes her mentor, she's a mess, but so is he, with his great novels long behind him. In Lidia's memoir, she details his many shortcomings, but he encouraged her talent–Kathy Acker did, too–and it seems unlikely her book would exist without his fatherly guidance.
Sometimes when two people meet while one is on the way up and the other is on the way down, they click in the middle. It's about timing as much as shared interests and compatible personas. If Lidia and Kesey had met at a different time, they might not have been able to connect in the same way.
Beyond the fact that this is a well-made film from a neophyte writer/director who appears to have learned well from the art house auteurs with whom she has worked, like Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women), it's exceptionally well cast. Thora Birch hasn't had the easiest time of it since her American Beauty/Ghost World days, and she honors the faith Stewart, who also started out as a youth actor, puts in her.
Everybody else is pretty great, too, but Imogen Poots is fantastic.
It shouldn't be news that she's a very good actor--from 28 Weeks Later to last year's Hedda--but she convinces in all of Lidia's many guises, including champion swimmer, reckless drunk, and established author and mother.
It's often said that the book is better than the film, because it's often true, and The Chronology of Water, which started out as a short story, wouldn't have been possible without Lidia's life and work--something that affected Stewart so deeply she reached out years ago to visit the author, and the two became friends. As Stewart told Kate Dwyer, Yuknavich "changed or at least helped shape my relationship with expression itself; not a small thing.'
So, it isn't completely fair to say that the film is better than the book, but I preferred it, because Lidia can be a very performative writer.
That isn't to suggest she's insincere, though she does classify herself as an experimental writer, an outlier. Her book always makes sense, and there's nothing wrong with a varied writing style, but as a screenwriter, Stewart cuts out a lot of the showy stuff to focus on the essence of incidents. It's not about making Lidia more likeable, since she does plenty of unlikeable things to herself and others, but about making her more relatable–and less eager to impress.
A few years ago, Stewart acknowledged that she was having a hard time finding funding for her film, and it led to a lot of hand-wringing from critics in light of her achievements as an actor, but she found a way--filming in Latvia and Malta, for one thing--and she also found a distributor--The Forge--but not one of the big names you might expect, so her debut hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, despite a six-minute standing ovation at Cannes and praise from the likes of Sheila O'Malley and Richard Brody.
Things might have been different if Kristen Stewart had cast herself, but she made the best choice, the right choice, in casting UK-born Imogen Poots to play all-American fuckup-turned-bestselling-novelist Lidia Yuknavich.
She could have put herself front and center, and it might have pleased financiers, but she chose to honor the story of a woman who made sense out of her life through writing. I couldn't say for sure, but I believe the film served a similar purpose for its maker, who has really done herself proud.
The Chronology of Water, which opened in Seattle on Jan 9, returns for a run at SIFF Film Center thanks to the Grand Illusion Cinema on Jan 30 and Feb 1, 12, and 18. Images from MK (Imogen Poots), Kino-Zeit (Poots and Thora Birch), Les Films du Losange / The Daily Beast (Susannah Flood, Michael Epp, and kids), The Forge (Flood), Variety (Jim Belushi), and Hawthorne Books (Ken Kesey, Lidia Yuknavich, and other students).
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