As an actor, Kristen Stewart brings a stupid kinetic energy to each role she plays; Even when she always seems to vibrate with her own intensity. As a director, she infused Water chronology – an adaptation of an impressionist memory of the cult writer Lidia Yuknavitch, projection in the section of respect for the Cannes Film Festival, with this same personal electricity, exploding what could be a conventionally sequential biopic in the flashes, the flakes and the undulations that can be assembled as you go. Or not, of course: these pieces of memory can simply be adopted in all their lively and meticulously planned disarray. If it is a biopic, it is not like the one you have seen before.
Imogen Poots embodies Lidia of her first scenes as a champion of the swimming of schoolgirl to her possible emergence as a writer with a relaxed life: house, partner, child and office with water views. Like Stewart, Pots is 35 years old, but there is never a time when you question his age in the role; It does not depend on this kind of realism. What she brings to Lidia, as an ill -treated child of an intimidating father and a permanent fashionable mother, is a conviction that has nothing to do with her real age. She feels like a teenager, miserable and desperate escape. It is the flavored drug addict of the twenties which is transported by paramedical paramedics. Just as powerfully, she is a bereaved mother and a tormented alcoholic virago who punishes her first husband Philip (Earl Cave) to be too nice. She is practically in all settings and she always feels good, her performance pulsating with urgency.
Related: Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read all of Deadline film reviews
This emergency is also integrated into the construction of the film. Everything is in constant and motivated motion. The frantic edition guarantees that the scenes flash forward and backwards in time, sometimes in one minute: these alternating shots work as a visual metronome, checking from one side to the other. The smaller sequences are broken with bandage jumping cuts: just the opening of an envelope, the work of a single second, includes three cups. The fingers around the paper move, are moved again, then again: RIP!
The sounds also surprise us when coming from anywhere. A first voiceover, apparently Lidia’s writings, is discouraging – it sounds, in fact, like a teenage newspaper – but we then hear his father’s voice, intrusive in his life thousands of kilometers, obsessive and annoying. Or we hear her pencil, amplified to fill the room, as she scribbles in her notebooks with such an emergency that she breaks her head.
The location of Lidia, a small child, is her sister Claudia (Thora Birch) who returns to her life when she is older, pregnant and in need. She remembers, in the pieces of memory that float through the story, which Claudia left adolescence “to save her own life”; She would be sent to her room to give her father (Michael EPP, terrifying) free to beat, harangue and otherwise abuse the sister who would later take her place.
What happens to girls is not detailed; Sex scenes, with the exception of a few disturbing episodes of joy without joy, are also reluctant. Stewart shows his characters largely in close -up, often from strange angles: watching a chin, for example, or getting closer to a single eye or the verticilla with a ear fills the screen. There are times when it is not entirely clear whose eye in our towers, but the shots are so short that it hardly matters. They are all part of the same mosaic.
Lidia’s release of the past – real or, as she suggests, in her voiceover, has reshaped in a story that she is ready to have – begins when she joins a university writing course in Oregon with Ken Kesey, author of We flew over the cuckoo nest. Like her, he started as a university athlete, loves William Faulkner and believes in words beyond anything else. Like her, he brings a hip ball to class. He is her simple spirit but, more importantly, tells her that she is a writer. It is not a clear road, but it is its way forward. Stewart, by reading the memories which was the ultimate result of Kesey’s demand, clearly feels to be another of their tribe. She says that she was only halfway when she contacted Yuknavitch to ask her if she could adapt her, then spent eight years writing one version after another.
The film she made is simultaneously raw and complex, as precise and potentially perilous as an JENGA skyscraper. So much visual and sound artifice could easily collapse on itself, but it is stable. On several levels, it must be admired. Stewart has successfully found a form that corresponds to the thorny visceral quality of the prose of Yuknavitch, as evidenced by the readings in the film, and its main subject: trauma. It also maintains unshakable support for a central character who is sometimes difficult to bear. At the same time, so much technical complexity create a feeling of distance from what we are told. We see what happened to Lidia Yuknavitch, we understand it, we appreciate the art of Stewart. The clear effect, to be honest, is a little cold.
Title: Water chronology
Festival: Cannes (a certain respect)
Director: Kristen Stewart
Scriptwriters: Kristen Stewart, Andy Mingo
Casting: Imogen Pots, Thora Burch, Michael EPP, Earl Cave, Jim Belushi
Sales agent: Films of the diamond
Operating time: 2 h 8 minutes
