Beneath the blazing French sky Kristen Stewart, wearing a conservative Chanel suit with black trim and studded with gold buttons, her bleached blonde hair side-swept in fashionable rat tails, discussed the culmination of eight effortful years to bring her directing debut, Chronology of Water, to the Cannes Film Festival.
Based on the bestselling memoir of the same title by Lidia Yuknavitch, the film is a visually lush adaptation of a swimmer’s relationship to water as Yuknavitch (Imogen Poots) comes to terms with trauma, addiction and self discovery, driving her pain into art.
An Olympic swimming hopeful flees her abusive home via a Texas swimming scholarship. After losing it to addiction, she studies under Ken Kesey in Oregon. Through writing, family, and self-discovery, she overcomes her troubled past.
“I wanted to screw with the film's form,” Stewart (Twilight) told Deadline Hollywood. “How we internalise violence — it's incredibly, viscerally violent to be a woman — is to take pain and make it feel good by reframing it.”
The film is about reprocessing pain. “There's a blood and water motif that runs through the film but it’s primarily a movie about memory, about a woman who endures a lot of pain and violation. She puts the pain through her body and shoves out something different that's tied to pleasure, joy and release,” she said.
“You'll understand the film even if you don't have a specific relationship to abuse, like this woman does, if you've been walking the Earth as a female being told to shut up. It's pervasive treatment of women. It's not my opinion, it's fact. But there are certain pieces of work that allow you to exist. All of a sudden you go, 'Wow! That's a mirror. We're stronger together'.”
Stewart submitted the film for consideration at the festival and then claims to have become “petulant” over having done so. In a press conference with The Wrap she explained. “I submitted the film before it had found itself — a really rough cut, 40 minutes longer than it is now.” She doesn’t seem to contemplate the luxury of being able to submit a film that wasn’t fully edited for consideration, and yet was still accepted. She used the analogy of “birthing” the film: “All of a sudden, it detached from my body. I looked at it and it rose to the surface. It had volition and a voice. It had a face. I wanted to dress it, brush its hair and send it to school.”
The Oscar nominee (for her Princess Diana performance in Spencer), refers to screenwriter Dylan Meyer as her husband. The latter is also a producer on the film. The two reportedly tied the knot on April 20 this year. “I wanted to make a movie about what we can do about things that happened to us,” said Stewart. “It was a hard film to make.”
The 35-year-old was filled with doubt upon completion of the 30-day shoot in Latvia, before beginning the nine month editing process and discovering, “these stunning, beautiful gifts”, as she called the film footage. The film is different. “Ingratiating yourself to newness is difficult,” she said. “You need to be able to find emotional connectivity between images.”
Jim Belushi, Thora Birch and Kim Gordon also star in Stewart’s debut film. Not yet released, its already garnering Oscar buzz for the director and her leading lady, Poots.
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