Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut has received a six and half minute standing ovation after its premiere at Cannes Film Festival. Early reviewers who were all-too ready to dismiss the star’s first effort and the film’s bloated production timeline have come out impressed, praising Stewart’s handling of difficult subject matter.
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Stewart’s long awaited directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, is based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name. It stars Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later) as Lidia, following her from her childhood in the Pacific Northwest through years of sexual abuse and destructive behaviors to her blossoming as a swimmer, writer and mother.
Speaking before the crowd at Cannes last Friday, Stewart said the film was “about iteration. Getting up and trying again. Repossessing your body, your desires, your ambitions and your dreams. I wanted to create a form that was unruly and, again, hard to pin down.”
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The film itself went through that process, taking eight years to make. But so far, it looks like that time and effort has paid off.
The Chronology of Water received a six and a half minute standing ovation, and early reviews have praised the direction. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Stewart “appears to have found her voice, announcing the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance but with unimpeachable commitment to honoring her subject’s story.”
“As a writer-director, [Stewart’s] working on the high wire — making a movie that’s all about consciousness, one that shows you everything but never spells it out too obviously,” Variety writes. Overall, the film is sitting at 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and has a “generally favorable” rating on Metacritic.
But after eight years, Stewart was apparently expecting the battle to make the film to keep on going. “I’m totally willing for people to come for it,” she told New York Times. “I’m almost wanting it.”
It turns out the lengthy gestation period influenced the film in a big way, maybe for the better. “We ended up tossing six weeks of prep and free-jazzing the movie that I had thought about for eight years, instead of trying to control every image and flash [image in a montage] that were written into the script,” Stewart said.
“What ended up happening were these ephemeral moments that I could never have planned for started relating to one another across time and the movie had a life.”
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