Cannes Review: The Chronology of Water is Kristen Stewart’s Elemental Calling Card for Directorial Greatness

Book adaptations yield two kinds of films: those that transliterate and those that translate. While the former insist on keeping the source material’s spirit at the cost of a rendition so faithful it comes to stage things rigidly, like a direct transplant from page to screen, the latter trust both mediums so completely, allowing for […] The post Cannes Review: The Chronology of Water is Kristen Stewart’s Elemental Calling Card for Directorial Greatness first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 26, 2025 - 22:05

Cannes Review: The Chronology of Water is Kristen Stewart’s Elemental Calling Card for Directorial Greatness

Book adaptations yield two kinds of films: those that transliterate and those that translate. While the former insist on keeping the source material’s spirit at the cost of a rendition so faithful it comes to stage things rigidly, like a direct transplant from page to screen, the latter trust both mediums so completely, allowing for some poetic gap between book and film as if translating an idiom from one language to another. Adaptation can be a risky venture for seasoned filmmakers, let alone a newcomer. Even more so if you’re an A-list actress, whose directorial debut likely faces a great deal of scrutiny. In light of this, Kristen Stewart’s decision to adapt the 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water by American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch––who is probably better-known for her second book (and first published with a major press) The Small Backs of Children––suggests that the match between artist and material was anything but forced or accidental.

Yuknavitch’s prose is muscular, contracting and loosening with every (true) encounter she describes: whether it’s about her own body as a girl and competitive swimmer among other girls in the locker room or the men and women who have scarred and loved her in different ways, the flow of her personal narration colors the book with unpredictability. The Chronology of Water is a writer’s memoir in every sense of the phrase, full of awe and disgust, fueled by the inevitability of art––what you have to make when you can’t not make it. All of this, told in an impressionistic style, makes a challenge of adapting The Chronology of Water without simplifying the ambivalent relationship between art and one’s body that fuels Yuknavitch’s work. But Stewart knows better than that: if you can’t find a fitting form to tell a story, you have to invent it.

This is perhaps the most revelatory thing about the film: the legibility of Yuknavitch’s inspiration and conviction of Stewart’s approach. The Chronology of Water remains very faithful to its text, expanding the five-act structure and first-person narration into a textured, 16mm film-sanctuary where everything, once narrated, is safe forever. Cinematographer Corey C. Waters, in his biggest project so far, frequently uses extreme close-ups in static takes and cross-cut with others to show Lidia’s (Imogen Poots) body in fragments, matching the way she denies herself the wholeness of a person. A montage of significant images flash through at the film’s beginning––blood washed down the drain, pebbles placed on baby clothes, a pregnant woman’s stomach––as those gigantic close-ups fill the screen in their graininess; a crackling sound and mute pauses make room for an ambient score that drowns in the image. This is subjective cinema par excellence.

Stewart lets scenes play longer in other, more linear stretches, giving viewers a fuller context of Lidia’s life on the protagonist’s own terms: the stifling family dynamic, swimming, the reckless college experiences, drugs and booze, swimming, marriages and divorces, sex with men, sex with women, swimming, mourning, being a mother to a stillborn child, and swimming. Through her script adaptation, Stewart demonstrates a full and precise understanding of rhythm both within a scene and between them, but with an obvious experimental streak that one might compare to Maya Deren’s––earlier parts particularly, but also whenever Lidia’s past returns as a flashback or direct memory. One can almost feel a stale smell of the Yuknavitch family home seeping through the orange and yellow hues of these frames.

“Flowing” is perhaps the word that best describes Chronology of Water, but not in a vacuously metaphorical way. Kristen Stewart has instead managed to translate the flow of words through that of images and sound, to show a filmmaking fluid and strong-willed like a river that becomes more forceful with obstacles in its way. Dynamism and movement is what defines cinema as an art, too, and while this may be a truism, it takes both mastery and discipline to make form fit content so perfectly, on such an elemental level. Yuknavitch’s book is one of reflected pains and joys, a testimony to the resilience of a woman’s own body; Stewart’s filmmaking renders them not visible, not audible, but deeply felt.

The Chronology of Water premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: The Chronology of Water is Kristen Stewart’s Elemental Calling Card for Directorial Greatness first appeared on The Film Stage.