Kristen Stewart's The Chronology Of Water liquifies trauma into a slurry
Stewart's directorial debut laboriously adapts Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, expressionistically skimming a complex woman's surface.
Photo: Mubi
A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source, The Chronology Of Water sees Kristen Stewart liquify Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir into a expressionistic slurry. In her feature debut as writer-director, Stewart takes explicit pains to explicitly render Yuknavitch’s pain on screen, drenching the swimmer-turned-writer’s life—spanning childhood abuse, young-adult hedonism, and professional success—in over-styled and overindulgent imagery. Despite its relative formal boldness, The Chronology Of Water is as ineffectively elliptical and muttery as Stewart’s first short film, the similarly aquatic “Come Swim.”
In a shorter or more complex character study, that opaque aesthetic approach could bring the audience into its subject’s world, or translate a chaotic headful of emotions and coping mechanisms into a blast of elemental feeling. But The Chronology Of Water is two hours of simplistic, one-to-one, cause-and-effect personal history, disguised by its shifting shape. For each adolescent horror experienced by Lidia (Imogen Poots)—mostly at the hands of her sexually abusive father (Michael Epp)—there is a direct corollary to come later in her life. Even though Stewart’s film is more focused on evoking sensation than making sense, miring Lidia’s life in the various liquids of blood, piss, cum, and water (the latter from swimming pools, choppy seas, and tear ducts) never clarifies the woman underneath all the muck.
