The Chronology Of Water film review: Labour of love
Raw emotion and scattered memories combine for a true story of one woman surviving abuse and oppression
Kristen Stewart makes her directorial debut with this adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about addiction and abuse, an eight-year labour of love that mesmerisingly experiments with form in its non-linear structure. Shot on 16mm, the cinematography by Corey C Waters is flush with texture as it pieces together Yuknavitch’s fragmented recollections of her childhood growing up in 1970s San Francisco through to adulthood. Edited with an alarming energy by Olivia Neergaard-Holm, it features a central performance by Imogen Poots that overflows with raw emotion.
The audience is greeted with voiceover quotes from the book and hushed inner monologue played over scattered memories. Lidia (played by Anna Wittowsky as a child) doesn’t actually utter a word in much of the film’s early section. Her silence, though frustrating, is vital to understanding Lidia as she grows up in an oppressive household with an abusive father. Stewart conveys the sensation of being pushed down and drowning but also a disorientating sense of a life flashing before your eyes. The film doesn’t play out in chronological order, so the juxtaposition of Lidia’s life once free and tasting happiness through her writing, with a violent past relentlessly swimming to the surface delivers startling insight into her psychological state.
The supporting cast includes Jim Belushi as Ken Kesey, Thora Birch playing Lidia’s older sister and Kim Gordon as a photographer in a scene that evokes themes from Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Formally there are similarities between the way Lynne Ramsay navigated PTSD in You Were Never Really Here, with trauma flooding back at random times and the protagonist desperately trying to come up for air. The Chronology Of Water is an intoxicating and thoughtfully crafted debut that announces Stewart as an intuitive and bold filmmaker to watch.
The Chronology Of Water is in cinemas from Friday 6 February.