Kristen Stewart’s Take on Sex, Drugs and Healing

“I bled, I peed, I cried, and vomited.” This sentence comes at the end of the second paragraph of The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary, extraordinarily raw 2011 memoir about growing up, nearly giving up, and straining to getting a grip on a traumatic past. It follows one of the most striking openings of any autobiography — an extended description of her holding her daughter moments after the stillborn baby has been delivered. Kristen Stewart has been talking about bringing Yuknavitch’s book to the screen for years. But she wasn’t interested in playing this survivor so much as directing this adaptation and, to quote this cover story, “make something subversive and beautiful and true.” Should she ever be able to bring to life the vision she had of this woman’s life, Stewart told anyone who asked (or didn’t ask), it would do justice to the horror and poetry of that moment. It would not shy away from the blood.

Stewart has accomplished what she set out to do, with honors. And were blood all that her take on Chronology delivered, this free-form biopic would still feel radical, bruising, aggressive in its honesty. But there’s a brief declaration that comes right after that liquid inventory: “I became water.” The breakdown to the elemental state that Yuknavitch, a champion high school swimmer, mentions in the face of experiencing such a tragedy suggests a complete meltdown. But it also hints at liberation, and while the movie showcases its hero numbing herself with sex, drugs, booze, and various other forms of self-destructive behavior, images of pools, rivers, lakes and cleansing baths are never far behind. Stewart opens her film with blood slowly entering the frame and mixing with the remnants of a shower swirling down a drain. But the shot favors what’s washing it away. You can’t accuse her of burying the lede.

Even nestled in Cannes‘ Un Certain Regard, the sidebar the fest reserves for first-time filmmakers and “non-traditional stories seeking international recognition,” Stewart’s directorial debut was going to have beaucoup eyes focused on it. Curiosity over what the former Twilight star and Oscar nominee would do behind the camera had been rampant in the days leading up to its premiere late Friday night at the Debussy Theater, and many would have considered anything that wasn’t the avant-garde equivalent of a vanity project to be a victory. What she’s done with this source material is, we have to say, incredible. There’s an almost punk sensibility behind showing the gauntlet that Imogen Poots, playing Yuknavitch from her late teens to her thirties, is forced to run. It’s obvious that Stewart aims to push envelopes, get in your face, make everything feel extra unvarnished in the name of being real.

Yet there’s also a sensitivity to what the writer has endured that balances out the more outré flourishes here, and you feel like Stewart and Poots are working in tandem to not reduce Yuknavitch to the sum of her painful memories. Lidia’s older sister (Thora Birch, whose quiet work here is equally as gutting) manages to get out from a household dominated by their sexually abusive father (Michael Epp). Lidia, however, is still stuck dwelling in the monster’s lair. Mom (Susannah Flood) numbs herself with liquor, a trick her youngest daughter will soon replicate. Even swimming, the one thing that offers her salvation from a terrible home life and possible ticket out of town, is tainted by violence; a coach promises “one lick [smack] for every pound you’re over” to his young female athletes, and makes good on the promise. She can’t escape the devil or her personal demons.

College life, chronic casual sex, bad decisions, the opportunity to collaborate with Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi), two ill-advised marriages and liberation through BDSM — courtesy of a dominatrix played with extra deadpan irony by Kim Gordon — await Yuknavitch on the other side of her tale. So does literary acclaim, a patient and handsome bearded stranger (Charlie Carrick) and something approaching peace. We’ve seen this story many times before. Still, given how Poots commits to the headfirst descent from one rock bottom to the next, as well as keeping the writer’s pain consistently simmering below the surface, you are relieved to see the tide of agony recede for the actor as much as you do for the character. It’s that kind of all-or-nothing type of performance. The former option wins.

What’s interesting is that while Stewart doesn’t sublimate her own artistic tendencies and reservoir of rage in telling Yuknavitch’s story — and what we can imagine is the shared narrative of a lot of women, creative types or otherwise — she’s keenly aware of the responsibility of making sure she gets the perspective of her subject right. That’s what most impressive about her debut, even more than the faded Kodachrome aesthetic of the 16mm cinematography, the elliptical editing style, and the favoring of the lyrical over the linear here. (If you had to locate a point of comparison for the movies overall aesthetic, the early works of Gus Van Sant would be the most likely option.)

But if there is personal expression abound in Stewart’s debut, there’s also precious little ego. Nor are the tics that too often prick or sink the work of actors feeling out what it’s like to call the shots. We’d hate to see her give up acting altogether — she’s too good at getting under the skin of too many different types. If this is the first of many filmmaking endeavors from Stewart, however, we welcome everything that is to come. She’s proven that she’s not afraid to draw blood. And that, in the end, she understands the art of making images flow together in a way that feels just south of transcendent.