"A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source, The Chronology Of Water sees Kristen Stewart liquify Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir into a expressionistic slurry. In her feature debut as writer-director, Stewart takes explicit pains to explicitly render Yuknavitch's pain on screen, drenching the swimmer-turned-writer's life-spanning childhood abuse, young-adult hedonism, and professional success-in over-styled and overindulgent imagery."
"It's easy to glean the broad strokes. Lidia finds an escape route away from her predatory dad and alcoholic mom in swimming, which earns her an athletic scholarship to a school out of town and sparks her bisexual awakening in a quiet corner of the locker room. Once at college, Lidia's painful early life manifests in rebellion-Stewart relays this, as she relays almost everything in the film, through fractured quick cuts of warm-hued close-ups."
The Chronology Of Water presents Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir as a highly stylized, expressionistic film that prioritizes sensation over clarity. Kristen Stewart, in her writer-director debut, renders the protagonist's life-spanning trauma through over-styled imagery drenched in liquids—blood, piss, cum, and water—and repetitive, fractured quick cuts. The film traces Lidia's escape through swimming to an athletic scholarship, a bisexual awakening in a locker room, and later rebellion, mapping each trauma to a direct later corollary. Formal boldness registers, but the opaque aesthetic and simplistic cause-and-effect structure obscure Lidia's interiority rather than reveal it.
Read at Jezebel
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]