Cannes: The Chronology of Water film review — Imogen Poots shines in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut

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Kristen Stewart has a history of doing things her own way — including here at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2018 she defied the event’s strict red-carpet dress code, which mandates high heels for women, by casting off her pumps and treading the hallowed red carpet of the Grand Théâtre Lumière barefoot. Now the actor returns as director with her first feature, The Chronology of Water, a film that again pulses with a fierce rebellious spirit.

It opens with a shot of blood disappearing down a shower plughole, as if the last vestiges of Stewart’s vampiric Twilight Saga fame were being washed away. Since those 2000s beginnings, she has shown her taste for the indie and arty as an actor in auteurist films such as Personal Shopper, Certain Women and Spencer — and so it proves here with her piercingly intense adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir.

We begin in the 1970s, the photography of the era evoked in the screen’s rounded edges and saturated oranges and yellows. Here they evoke not nostalgia but the ache of jaundiced and semi-faded memories, the uneasy feeling reinforced by discordant strings on the soundtrack.

Imogen Poots gives a blazing performance as Lidia, a promising teen swimmer who endures beatings and sickening sexual advances from her violently authoritarian father (Michael Epp) and is neglected by her addled mother (Susannah Flood). An older sister (later played Thora Birch) tries in vain to keep the worst at bay. The mood is tense but also woozy — in a dreamy, weary voiceover Lidia marvels at “how gone she was” — the slippery nature of recall perhaps explaining the title.

Escape comes, albeit too late, with a university scholarship during which she plunges voraciously into all the sex, booze and drugs college life has to offer. She looks back in pity at her meek first boyfriend (Earl Cave), who gets the full force of her exploding libido but also her unbottled anger. Sexcapades with women prove more successful and lead to a flirtation with BDSM. But not even pain can block out the pain.

Enter Jim Belushi as bohemian professor and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey who brings some welcome light relief, creative guidance and also high-quality Quaaludes. But the levity doesn’t last. Stewart turns the intensity back up to maximum and mostly to good effect, though at time the stylistic tics tip over into self-conscious student film territory. 

But Poots keeps our attentions fixed, daring us to look away as Lidia begins to find her focus as a writer, that creative outlet proving the best drug of all. By the end her talent is shining vividly — and Stewart too has made a bright start to her directing career.

★★★★☆

Festival continues to May 24, festival-cannes.com