It is not clear if it was destiny, the very meaning of life, or simply fame, but Kristen Stewart (Los Angeles, 1990) was almost born with the obligation to be a director. Attitude, gesture, and even a bad temper, she has it all. And we are not saying this, she is. "Since I started acting at 9 years old, I was clear that I would end up directing. It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment," she says excitedly, almost euphoric, just 24 hours after the presentation of her directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival last May. "I have been sleepless for six weeks and have been working on this project for eight years. I feel like I have spent my whole life filming The Chronology of Water," she adds. The recently released film takes Lidia Yuknavitch's autobiographical novel and turns it, clearly, into a personal matter. Exaggeratedly personal from any point of view.
"In truth, everything that happens to the author, from abuse to mistreatment, is extreme. But somehow when I read the novel, I felt like it was talking about me; that it was talking about my life and, in a way, about all women," she pauses. "I feel and see that women have been forced to repress our natural instincts. And that is something that needs to be addressed," she pauses again. "I'll give you an example. There is a scene in the movie of female ejaculation. The protagonist's hand covers everything. She says to herself: 'I didn't know a girl's body could do that.' That sentence brought me immense joy when I read it because of all it implies. Women are generally forced to hide. We are told not to silence the pain, not to tell anyone we are pregnant until weeks later, to keep everything to ourselves. A woman is expected to carry all that. And that is not healthy, it is not healthy to swallow the pain. It is necessary to release all that repression, to first understand it and then turn it into something productive." It is clear.
To set the stage, The Chronology of Water tells the story of its protagonist growing up in a home where she was a victim of sexual abuse. And how she turned her existence into a desperate escape from all the ghosts that never stopped haunting her. First, it was swimming (hence the title and the omnipresence of water); then, sex; later, drugs, and a little later, more sex and many more drugs. And so on until literature appeared to soothe and heal what probably would never have had a cure or calmness otherwise.
And what applies to literature, Stewart is convinced applies equally to cinema, to her cinema. "In truth," she says, "if I have to say what the main argument of the film and my conception of cinema itself is, it is to reclaim the pain and transform it into something positive, even into pleasure. I go back to what I said before. Many things are imposed on us from childhood, even if we have not experienced the type of trauma that Yuknavitch suffered. And now I am not just talking about women. The same applies to everyone, of course. However, the world we live in where god, the teacher, the director, the psychiatrist... where everything is eminently male figures; the world we live in, I say, makes it impossible for young women to feel owners of their intimacy. Life attacks us and imposes itself on us."
Stewart recounts that throughout the almost decade it took her to make the film, she almost gave up more than once. "Accepting failures helps you see things clearly," she comments. But, despite that, and with the help of directors like Pablo Larraín, for whom she worked on Spencer, and Sofia Coppola, to whom she gave the script to read, things flowed. In fits and starts, but they flowed. "What I have learned, among many other things, is that the script does not always help, it is not always the most important thing. We filmed for hours and the movie was built by removing, by extracting from it everything that is not essential, everything that has no life," she reasons almost in ecstasy. Or just tired, which is similar. And so, it must be acknowledged, the result vibrates in every frame.
"For too long we have been told that personal stories do not matter, that we must detach from our bodies to speak authoritatively about the world around us. Well, no, on the contrary, we must bring it all back to the body. To hell with form," she says and, once again, insists: "Women have to open our bodies wide. We have to break the molds. When I watch movies by men, I tell myself: 'I want to do the same, but in my own way.' Let's look inward." That's it.