★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
As an actor, Kristen Stewart always has an eye out for the unobvious detail, an expression or gesture or sideways glance to suggest something other and deeper than the words in the script. Her keen vision is alive and flourishing in “The Chronology of Water,” her feature directing debut in which she doesn’t appear (the riveting, risk-taking Imogen Poots seizes the star spot) or follow the traditional biopic rules or, let’s face it, any rules at all.
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“The Chronology of Water” is based on the 2011 memoir of Lidia Yuknavitch (Poots), a competitive swimmer whose life is brushed with trauma and triumph and a near-paranoid aversion to self-pity. Self-loathing? That’s another story. Stewart had previously directed a 17- minute short called “Come Swim” about a man lying on the bottom of the ocean, waiting.
This movie waits, too, skittering among images that come at you with no guarantee they’ll cohere. The script that Stewart wrote with Andy Mingo is just a runaway for those images, exquisitely shot on grainy 16mm by cinematographer Corey C. Waters. Lidia detaches when she can from the sexual abuse of her father (Michael Epp, seen in flashes, rarely in full—too scary). Her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch) suffered the same assaults. And their connection is a bond, however fragile, since Claudia escaped her father’s abuse, leaving Lidia to cope.
Kristen Stewart’s directing debut is not an easy sit, but in tandem with actress Imogen Poots, she creates a film that doesn’t follow tidy biopic rules or, let’s face it, any rules at all.
Stewart makes the sexual abuse implicit rather than graphic, but the impact is no less shattering as the young Lidia, played by Anna Wittowsky, resists the urge to join her strung-out mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), in unseeing complicity.
The grown Lidia often uses alcohol, drugs and sex to do it. But when her swimming scholarship is on the line, along with her Olympic aspirations, Lidia learns she can’t do it alone or even at all. Water remains her constant refuge, obliterating the things she can’t face. “In water, like in books, you can leave your life,” she says. It’s an idea the comes alive in Stewart’s vision.
But even water can’t provide a full escape from the chaos of Lidia’s life. Her marriage to sweet-natured folkie Phillip, nicely played by Earl Cave, son of musician Nick Cave, provides a sweetness Lidia doesn’t think she deserves. Stewart starts her film with Lidia giving birth to a stillborn baby girl, the blood and the baby’s blue fingers seared in her memory. And ours.
Still, Stewart refuses to turn her film into misery porn, just as Lidia herself ultimately refuses to give up on her life. In tandem with Poots, whose transformative performance catches every emotional curveball her director throws at her, Stewart keeps swimming past the obvious into a place where nuanced reflection is possible, at least for a time.
Lidia finds an open door in writing. In the late ’80s, at the the University of Oregon (where she earned her Ph.D.), Lidia workshopped with counterculture icon Ken Kesey (a knockout Jim Belushi) and honed a wild-thing style that became her memoir and now this untameable movie. “The Chronology of Water” is not what anyone would call an easy sit. But the exhilarating, full-tilt charge of Stewart’s imagination immerses us into a woman’s journey toward independence that becomes, against the tide of tidy sentiment, a thing of bruised beauty.