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‘The Chronology of Water’ Review: Kristen Stewart’s Directorial Debut Is a Stirring Drama of Abuse and Salvation, Told With Poetic Passion
Imogen Poots seizes the screen as Lidia Yuknavitch, who embraces swimming and sex and drugs and anger, all to make herself whole.
It’s based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who told the story of how she grew up in a sexually abusive household, and how she attempted to squirm away from the legacy of it — through competitive swimming, through sex and drugs and other escape hatches, and ultimately through becoming a writer in the mode of Charles Bukowski. Lidia, played by Imogen Poots, keeps flashing back to the San Francisco home in which she grew up with her older sister (Thora (Birch); her mother (Susannah Flood), who was lost in a passive fog, always looking the other way; and her father (Michael Epp), in his horn-rims and Clark Kent haircut, who was sharp and handsome and stern, and highly attentive, and full of stinging hurtful words, with an anger that snapped like a whip. That extends from when she becomes a couple with a folk-singing sensitive guy (Tom Sturridge), except the passivity that makes him soothing also enrages her (so she rages back at him), to the moments when she’s drugging and fornicating, to the scene where she finally says “Fuck you, motherfucker” to her father.
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