This graphic true-life story of cult-writer Lidia Yuknavitch is a masterclass in balancing the hideous and the sublime.
The Chronology of Water opens in a glitchy way, with an underwater camera pointed at a woman in an orange bathing suit standing at the edge of a swimming pool, then cut to black. Then the image again, and cut to black. Eventually the woman dives into the water, and as she does, we’re immediately taken away from the pool and brought to the white tiles of a shower, where blood is pooling and streaming down the drain as water runs, the narrator’s voice saying, ‘I thought about starting from the beginning, but that’s not how I remember it. It’s all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations.’ And so it goes.
As a child, Lidia and her older sister Claudia are severely verbally, physically and sexually abused by their father, while their alcoholic mother refuses to do anything about it. To cope, Lidia pushes her body, throwing herself into competitive swimming and becoming a champion. Being able to channel her pain works so well that she wins a university scholarship, one which she can’t maintain because she’s also channelling that pain through drugs and alcohol. So now what? ‘Find meaning in life’s traffic,’ she is told by a well-intentioned councillor, but how could the councillor have known that Lidia’s traffic is one major crash after the other? Enter the notorious Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Merry Prankster fame. He runs a novel-writing group at a nearby university and asks Lidia, despite her not being enrolled, to join the others in a collaborative novel project. She does, and it saves her life.
This brutally affecting film adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water is Kristen Stewart’s feature-length directorial debut. Stewart – usually in front of the camera in such films as the incredibly popular Twilight saga and the biopic Spencer – also co-wrote the screenplay with Yuknavitch. One might think the fragmented telling visually softens the shock, but it doesn’t. It’s relentless, really; there’s simply too much of it in Lydia’s life, and it’s impossible, as an audience member, to not feel a voyeur. But what it does do exceptionally well is filmically extend the impulse of flashback as trauma’s resurfacing. Much like Yuknavitch’s prose, which has a ruthless rhythm to it that shines with brilliant moments of expansive simile, the fragmented abstraction creates something ugly-beautiful, like cruelty stunningly captured. Corey C. Waters’ cinematography works superbly in bringing the book’s intention to screen, very reminiscent of Terrance Malick.
Imogen Poots (Jimi: All Is by My Side, Vivarium) as Lidia is a revelation. If she doesn’t wrack up a string of best actress nominations, I predict backlash. Jim Belushi firmly belongs in the role of the physically used-up but emotionally and creatively motivated Ken Kesey, and Thora Birch as Claudia is quietly harrowing.
As one student in Lidia’s creative writing class runs out of the room in disgust while Lidia is reading from her work out loud, so too might an audience member at the cinema, such is the viscerality of the film – the sadism, the blood, the raw rings under the eyes. But there is so much water, and there is so much creation, and there is simply so much to admire in this film.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Distributor: Screen Inc
Rating 4.5 out of 5
