However get away Lidia does, and, lastly freed from paternal authority, she’s uncontrolled: consuming and taking medication, partying exhausting, flunking out, focusing on a mild guitar-playing boy named Phillip (Earl Cave) for a hearts-and-flowers romance whilst she mocks and berates him. She goes to rehab, marries Phillip, will get pregnant, leaves him, and strikes in together with her sister. Via all of it—her terrorized childhood, her reckless younger maturity, her bereavement—she writes in journals, fervently and lyrically, grabbing at expertise and emotion with determined urgency. At a roommate’s urging, Lidia joins a creative-writing workshop taught by Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). Kesey acknowledges her literary expertise and likewise empathizes together with her over the lack of her baby, having been deeply marked by the dying of certainly one of his sons in a street accident. As Lidia’s literary profession takes off—and she or he begins to write down the e-book on which the film relies—elements and figures from her turbulent previous reappear each in reminiscence and in bodily kind. The impact, as seen from the relative serenity of a household life that Lidia finally forges, is of a retrospective sense of future—of a life that writing has, in each senses of the phrase, saved.
“The Chronology of Water” compresses the overflowing story of Lidia’s turbulent life into aphoristic flashes and lyrical outpourings. The leaps in time have the eerie impact of effacing time—the layered succession of photos implying their simultaneity in Lidia’s thoughts. Stewart’s methodology of reminiscence leaps suggests {that a} storehouse of recollections is, primarily, simultaneous, with no fastened sequence beside the deep grooves of connection lower within the thoughts by the inescapable power of emotion. The film’s exceptional method to reminiscence presents it as the other of free affiliation—name it obligatory affiliation, the suppression of freedom by the ability of ingrained and imposed patterns.
The film is constructed round such patterns, and its fixed leaping amongst emotionally explosive fragments displays the topic of Yuknavitch’s memoir. The movie’s relentless depth, its focus on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma. This can be a childhood that had all its ordinariness burned out of it by the linking of even seemingly trivial gestures (an providing of sweet, a shower, a swim, the mud in a nook of a room) to a complete array of bodily and psychological agonies. Stewart conveys the thought of bodily ache and bodily pleasure with imaginative fervor, and certainly one of her prime inspirations—in a scene of Lidia and two different girls in a sexual relationship—is to evoke, by means of excessive closeups, a way of carnal textures. That is eroticism with out prurience.
The punctuation of the narrative with non-chronological flashes and scene is constant by way of virtually the entire movie. Typically Stewart runs clusters of highly effective moments collectively to play like mini-episodes. But the dramatic impact of this fragmentation is to suppress any sense of an arc. In consequence, “The Chronology of Water” is a film with little ahead movement; it lacks the dramatic momentum to hold the story by way of its sequence of quick sensations. That is the place constancy of adaptation suggests its limitations. The movie’s impression-based kind is caught between sensation and approximation; little or no is introduced with concrete directness. A extra tensile drama would contain stepping again, seeing Lidia in a wider context, observing her literary exercise and her literary life—the current tense of the writerly reminiscence—in additional sensible element. As a substitute, “The Chronology of Water” dangers depicting the current tense of the established author’s life as a predestined triumph moderately than an ongoing exercise. The result’s a first-person story with a lot of the particular person eliminated.
The shape additionally has an impact on Poots’s efficiency. At one stage, it’s remarkably virtuosic, displaying an uncanny potential to incarnate Lidia persuasively from highschool to center age. Nonetheless, it’s constrained by Stewart’s snippet-centered model, which implies that, as an alternative of growing emotion, Poots can solely emblematize it, together with in scenes of the restricted and clichéd passage between laughter and tears. Stewart’s rapt consideration to Poots’s highly effective extremes of expression is at odds with the dramatic unfolding of character together with narrative. Nonetheless, the fragmentary method does permit just a few supporting performances, in roles clipped into dispersed bits, to shine. Epp, as Lidia’s father, provides all kinds of expressions in a slim spectrum of tyranny; Belushi performs Kesey with gravelly whimsy and lifeworn allure; and Birch, because the grownup Claudia, initiatives in every look an abiding poise that’s a continuing exertion of internal energy.
Even with its elisions and frustrations, “The Chronology of Water” displays a directorial conception that escapes from the acquainted pathways of narrative filmmaking and grafts a component of the avant-garde into its drama. Within the course of, the movie evokes a primary stress within the historical past of cinema: the everlasting directorial wrestle to show cumbersome tools, organizational complexity, and the sheer truth of collaboration right into a type of private expression. To Stewart’s daring defiance of the habits of narrative, she provides one other layer of problem find a option to private expression: the movie’s relationship to its literary supply. Devotion and constancy could constrain creativeness moderately than inspiring it, and Stewart’s adaptation, for all its ingenuity and audacity, falls wanting transformation. ♦
