If you like hair draped over the lens and drops of blood dispersing in water, then I have a movie for you. The Chronology of Water, the feature directorial debut of Kristen Stewart, based on a 2011 memoire by Lidia Yuknavitch, is not only that kind of movie, it’s also an absolute knock-out.
Stewart’s imagery, an insistent pastiche of confrontational close-ups on objects and interior details and anxious facial expressions, is actually very precise in its purpose: forcing us to inhabit the head of Lidia (Imogen Poots, who’s amazing) first, but then, more importantly, forcing us to become allied with her struggle to escape said head. As focussed and small-scale as the perspective is, it’s also a movie that kind of recounts the struggle of modernism itself: how can the broken shards of a tortured interior experience be erupted outward in a way that is truthful, while also maintaining a relatability that others can accept as not just hers, but ours?
Lidia’s memories form a persistent stain like a buildup of black mold: brutalized, emotionally and sexually, by her father while growing up (the film is definitely not for everyone, be warned) her childhood recollections are like shrapnel lodged in a mind grown deformed around it. Repetitive, evocative images that she’s retained – the feel of water, a grimy corner, a candy, a smooth pebble – have been stained by association with terror and shame. It’s an impressive filmmaking coup that we easily understand what these images feel like, as Stewart repeatedly returns to them (the editing, by Olivia Neergaard-Holm, is handled super well), and we come to feel as if they are imprinted on the insides of our eyelids, ready to reemerge every time we try to close our vision in escape. The interior of Lidia’s mind is like the interior of a prisoner’s cell: every wretched corner too familiar, and still there if you don’t look at it.
As an adult, Lidia is a wreck, and she eventually starts to gravitate towards writing about her life as a way to cope. Though we were promised a scrambled chronology by an early voice-over monologue, the movie actually resolves into a pretty linear and straightforward narrative once adulthood is reached. And we’re better off for it: still buffeted and horrified by the ordeal, we – receptive, sympathetic audience that we are – still come to cheer and hope for her, and we’re even allowed to enjoy some parts of the tale along the way (Jim Belushi, showing up to play an aging Ken Kesey, is particularly delightful). We’ve been so deeply pushed inside Lidia’s head by the film’s methods – the close-ups, the repetitions, the shock of cuts that often jump back and forth in time – that we experience this emergence as the triumph of the film’s early emotional power, recontextualized. As our heroine learns to relate her story, we see that the artwork’s ability to use formal invention to help us access her perspective is really the story itself. Lidia’s sentences and Stewart’s camera are using different (if rhyming) techniques, but the fact that either or both can work is the miracle of modern art, a miracle that, leaving the theatre after watching this masterpiece, seems to have the power to save anyone, to save us all.
***
“Form” is one of those words in film criticism that feels too nebulous for me to understand. The decision to use a close-up of a woman’s hair is form, okay, but is the decision to have characters sing and dance a formal choice as well? It’s not content, but it is a choice about how to relate the story, and like any such decision, is also a choice about how much to trust the audience. Will they follow along, stomping and clapping, as they’re led from the parlour containing plot down into the cellar where feelings and meaning are stored?
The Testament of Ann Lee is the second knock-out masterpiece I’ve seen this month, and it’s a musical. Directed by Mona Fastvold, from a script by herself and collaborator/partner Brady Corbet (they also cowrote The Brutalist), it follows an 18th-century leader of the Shakers religious sect as she spreads her gospel from Manchester to Colonial New York. Whereas Water uses the techniques of experimental film to show how modernism – in the sense of 20th-century arts trends – can connect one life to others, Ann Lee is using the techniques of a specific film genre to relate the birthing of modernity – in the sense of contemporary life under a society reorganized by industrial capitalism. But maybe they’re kind of doing the same thing?
Ann Lee has also been traumatized by sexual demands made upon her body, the thoughtless needs of others hammered into her memories – and, like Lidia, she struggles to recover from stillbirths – so she bans sex among her followers. Yet interconnectedness is her faith. With a perspective awake to mystery and hungry for beauty – plus a touchingly sincere willingness to believe the perspective of Ann’s disciples on their own terms – Fastvold settles on song and dance as a way to represent the sense of understanding and community felt by the Shakers. Musical numbers have always been a trick used to inject outbursts of subjective sensation into the more rigorous formalism of classical filmmaking; often, a song-and-dance bit comes when a character can’t contain their joy, or their sorrow, forcing their perspective to bleed through the objective lens and colour the whole world: that’s modernism! But this is a movie set at a point in the historical record where that impulse begins to feel just barely applicable, as people become recognizable enough to us, in our time, that we can half imagine their minds as legible. The men and woman of early-modern England still see themselves as serving God, but the rise of Protestantism, and capitalism, and political upheavals, have instilled them with a sensation that they are each responsible for their relationships to the divine, on terms of their own choosing and, maybe more frighteningly, are responsible for their relationships to one another as well.
What originally draws Ann to the Shakers is a meeting where believers confess their most awful hidden thoughts to one another: a man admits to feeling titillated by the sight of his underage sister’s naked body, and the others in the room moan and stomp in sympathy with his agonized secret world, making it also their own. They are learning to be bonded not by an external force hammering something into them, but by the disgorging and sharing of the nastiest personal bits of their unordered inner selves, trusting that it can be accepted as legible by the group. Ann, when she becomes the leader of the sect in America, turns this ritual into a divine tool of conversion, beseeching a young woman to “exteriorize her rottenness” in front of the congregation.
The filmmaker’s trust in the communicability of this idea turns what could be little more than a Robert Eggers movie with songs into something that is itself almost a religious experience. The form of the musical, like the form of experimental film, helps us understand the idea – the belief! – that puking up your interiority, in all its horridness, can be a loving act of faith, and a building block for a shared world.