Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Kristen Stewart’s brilliant directorial debut is a sophisticated gut-punch

Based upon the award-winning 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristen Stewart’s directorial feature debut is as brilliant, gruelling and honest as its source material. Imogen Poots, in the lead role, has never been better: ferocious, traumatised, utterly compelling.

Shooting on 16mm in collaboration with cinematographer Corey C Waters and editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Stewart jumps back and forth in time, preferring visual collage and disconcerting use of flash frames to linear narrative. All this aligns with the experience of Yuknavitch, her quest for oblivion and the stop-go reckoning with the past in which she is engaged.

Raised in San Francisco, Lidia (played as a child by Anna Wittowsky) and her sister Claudia (Marlena Sniega and Thora Birch) are sexually abused and brutalised by their father Mike (Michael Epp), as their mother Dorothy (Susannah Flood) recedes into alcoholic passivity. When she fails to get a full college scholarship as a competitive swimmer, Mike takes sadistic pleasure in reading out the letters at the kitchen table. “If they don’t want you, then you don’t belong there,” he snarls.

After a scout from Texas Tech at a swimming meet offers her a fully paid place, she wastes no time in seeking liberation from her hellish home life and pursues her growing love of literature: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), Vita Sackville-West’s Saint Joan of Arc (1936), and, in time, the transgressive fiction of Kathy Acker. But some scars – physical and psychological – take longer to heal than others.

Swimming is an escape: “In water, like in books – you can leave your life.” So too are drugs, alcohol and sex. Lidia wields her hip flask like a shield: self-destructive behaviour is a form of defiance.

At the University of Oregon, her creative potential is spotted by Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) who includes her in the collective writing of the novel Caverns (1989). When Lidia cannot detect a metaphor in the fall of a rock to the ground, he urges her to trust her emerging instincts as a writer: “It has no metaphor! Fuck metaphors! It’s just a rock that fell!”

The movie begins with the stillbirth of her daughter and ends with Lidia’s discovery of the simple enchantments of motherhood in the water with her young son. But Stewart is much too sophisticated a director to present this as a moment of definitive catharsis. Both experiences co-exist within Lidia’s soul, teeming with the multiplicity of life and death. “Chronology convinces us that we are moving to a real place,” she says. But that sensation is an illusion. In that respect, The Chronology of Water is not only a portrait of human resilience and its price but also a profound meditation upon the nature of time.

Suggested Reading

The enchanting power of Richard Linklater

Matthew d’Ancona

STREAMING

Lord of the Flies (iPlayer, February 8)

On January 1, 1953, William Golding wrote to Jonathan Cape – one of many publishers that rejected the novel still titled Strangers From Within – that “even if we start with a clean slate like these boys, our nature compels us to make a muck of it.”

Having picked up two Emmys and a Golden Globe for Adolescence, Jack Thorne now adapts Lord of the Flies with confidence and flair (the first time, remarkably, that the book has been turned into a small-screen series). Undaunted by the novel’s aura of greatness and Peter Brook’s classic 1963 movie, he takes some liberties – but none that violates the spirit or meaning of Golding’s original.

So we have Piggy (David McKenna) teaching Ralph (Winston Sawyers), the elected chief of the boys stranded on an island, the words to Groucho Marx’s “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” from Animal Crackers (1930). We also learn Piggy’s real name, which Golding never let slip. Flashbacks permit the casting of Rory Kinnear and Daniel Mays in cameo roles.

But Thorne is a dramatist worthy of the novelist’s bleak message about “the end of innocence” and “the darkness of man’s heart”, and he deftly structures each of the four episodes around one of the principal characters: Piggy, Jack (Lox Pratt), Simon (Ike Talbut) and Ralph. This enables the drama to do full justice to the nuances of these characters – not least Jack, “chapter chorister and head boy”, leader of the hunters but also a frightened child. 

The performances are uniformly excellent and the migration from children’s adventure to pagan violence expertly handled. In their white face paint and tribal regalia, Jack’s followers look like the cadet wing of Colonel Kurtz’s Montagnard army in Apocalypse Now (1979). The music – Shostakovich, Tavener and Britten adding to the original score by Hans Zimmer, Kara Talve, and Cristobal Tapia de Veer – is beautifully judged, too. 

Golding’s novel was written in the shadow of looming nuclear catastrophe, and, like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), is a literary artefact of the early atomic age. Today, its dystopian speculations about human nature have a much broader resonance. Tear down the guard-rails, renounce social norms, dismiss the rule of law, and this is what we become. The beast that the boys fear lies within.

FILM

100 Nights of Hero (selected cinemas)

You don’t have to like magic realist stories, the spirit of The Handmaid’s Tale and the aesthetic formalism of Peter Greenaway to relish Julia Jackman’s second movie – but it helps. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Based on a 2016 graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, 100 Nights of Hero has a nested storytelling structure – the central element of which tells the tale of aristocratic bride Cherry (Maika Monroe), who is under pressure to bear an heir for her neglectful husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry).

When Jerome leaves Cherry in the company of his manipulative friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) – who quite openly hopes to seduce her – it falls to Hero (Emma Corrin), her loyal companion and maidservant, to keep him at bay. To this end, like Scheherazade, she uses her power as a storyteller: principally, spinning a yarn about another bride Rosa (Charli xcx) and her sisters, but doing so in instalments. Hero, it quickly becomes apparent, is also in love with Cherry.

Filmed at Knebworth House, the movie imagines a world of medieval courtliness and ritual, in which (thanks to Susie Coulthard’s splendid designs) the authorities wear beak masks in honour of their deity, Birdman (Richard E Grant), and women are forbidden from reading and writing. A secret sisterhood, denounced as witches, resists this patriarchal rule, coding storylines in needlework, concealing texts and telling one another fables and tales.

As always, Corrin – cast as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of Pride and Prejudice – steals the show, though Monroe and El-Masry are also on great form. Fearless in vision and already accomplished in her use of cinematic language, Jackman is definitely a director to watch.

THEATRE

I’m Sorry, Prime Minister Apollo Theatre, London, until May 9, then on tour until August 1)

I had forgotten how funny Sir Humphrey Appleby – the Whitehall Mandarin in Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister– could be when in full flow. In this final chapter of the classic political comedy, written by Jonathan Lynn for the stage, the long-retired cabinet secretary (Clive Francis picking up the baton from the late Nigel Hawthorne) tries to explain to his former boss Jim Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones in the role immortalised by the late Paul Eddington) why Brexit went wrong:

“Although our political lords and masters may have been experts in distortion, intrigue, chicanery and subterfuge, all undeniably necessary attributes in a negotiation of considerable complexity, it was demonstrably and unarguably true that facing simple reality was beyond the capacity of the unfortunately delusional principals, those to whom the people entrusted the management of the situation who indeed had proven skills in duplicity and concealment but not, sadly, in the essential comprehension and notification of so much disagreeable information.”

To which the bamboozled Hacker can only reply, as he always did: “What?”

But Jim – now Lord Hacker, master of Hacker College, Oxford – has not summoned his former right-hand man for a verbose analysis of Britain’s exit from the EU. After making a sexist joke at a conference and a series of gaffes about the Empire, India and the statue of Cecil Rhodes at a private dinner party at Oriel, he is facing calls for his resignation from the college’s fellows, postgraduates and undergraduates. 

Can Sir Humphrey get Jim out of one last jam? The two bemoan the decline of the world they knew and governed. But they are pulled up short by Hacker’s new care worker Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John), a gay Black woman with a first in English from Oxford. “Oh shut up, both of you,” she says. “You and your fragile old egos.” 

She calls Humphrey a “patronising old bugger” and points out to Jim that “Poor people can’t afford to economise”. When the conversation turns to trigger warnings, safe spaces and the legacy of colonialism, she acts as a Greek chorus, demanding that they at least consider the realities of modern life.“I used to understand how things worked,” says Jim. The strength of I’m Sorry, Prime Minister – four decades after the original series and its sequel (co-written by Lynn and Antony Jay, which ran from 1980 to 1988) – is that the two old men know full well that their era is past, that raging against every new idea is folly, that the price that their respective children paid for their careers is much more important. The play is not a plea for the ancien régime to be restored but a comic elegy to a bygone time, as richly entertaining as it is poignantly valedictory.