Online critics were cock-a-hoop back in 2014 when Kristen Stewart – aka Bella Swan out of the Twilight movies – published a poem in Marie Claire magazine. Stewart was 23 at the time, old enough to know better and young enough not to care, and wore her literary influences (Kerouac, Bukowski, Tom Waits) a little too readily on her sleeve.
“My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole” turned out to be a free-style, impressionistic affair, apparently written during a cross-country road trip and fuelled by the excitement of cocky gilded youth. It contained such lines as “Through our windows boarded up/ He hit your flint face and it sparked,” and “Devil’s not done digging/ He’s speaking in tongues all along the Panhandle,” and the critical response ran the gamut from glee to scorn to pitying condescension. It should be noted that the actor didn’t especially help her cause by talking her readers through the creative process. “I don’t want to sound so utterly pretentious,” she said with a fleeting flash of self-knowledge. “But after I write something, I go, ‘Holy shit, that’s crazy’.”
I’m expecting a similar reaction – glee, scorn and pity – to The Chronology of Water, Stewart’s labour-of-love feature directing debut, which is in cinemas in February. Her rites-of-passage drama is based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch and stars Imogen Poots as a damaged, striving artist, but it’s essentially Wiffle Ball: The Movie, an extended piece of teen poetry, which proves that Stewart has learned nothing from the Marie Claire incident except to hold the line and speak her truth and dare the critics to drown her out with their laughter. The film invites our derision and proceeds to plough on regardless with its non-linear plot, its dreamy narration and its close-up collages of shells and coloured pebbles. It’s brazen, it’s shameless; it’s faintly magnificent, too. It’s the kind of vanity project that gives the genre a good name.
There comes a time in the life of most successful performers, it seems, when they decide that they have a big personal movie inside them. It may be that they do, but more often than not, they should stay there, if only to spare us another spectacle from the gene pool that brought us Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea (2004), Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) or Madonna’s grovelling WE (2011). And while it’s true that one of these disasters will occasionally find itself reappraised and hailed as a classic, these examples are rare and shouldn’t be counted on. For every The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s spellbinding Depression-era fairytale, there are a hundred celebrity vanity pieces that were laughed out of town and now lie buried and forgotten.
If there is a lesson in all of this, it’s that personal films are a gamble; personal films spook the fans. The successful stars-turned-directors are the ones who play it smart and safe: the Ron Howards and Clint Eastwoods; the Ben Afflecks and Greta Gerwigs. Stewart might have taken this same route herself, given that she’s a household name with plenty of cultural cachet and a keen understanding of what separates a hit from a flop. Except that her sympathy has always been rather more with the flops – or rather with those films that try something different and risk looking ridiculous. At a time when she could have cashed in on Twilight and made a home in the mainstream, she was already off carving an arthouse niche in the likes of Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Certain Women (2016) and Personal Shopper (2016). She’s drawn to the margins, has a romantic attachment to outsiders, and has always been good at playing gauche and hungry lost souls.
I interviewed her once, around the time of Personal Shopper, and she explained that all of her characters are basically versions of her. “I can be nothing other than myself,” she said. “I know actors who say, ‘oh, this role had nothing to do with me,’ ‘it’s just the character’, and I think, ‘Yeah, but it’s still your interpretation of the character’. Because you can never get away from being you … It’s still about self. It’s still all about me.”
It’s likely that the heroine of The Chronology of Water is mostly Stewart as well, or at least how she sees herself, and never mind the fact that she’s called Lidia, based on the book’s author and embodied by another actor. “Who would love a woman like me?” Lidia asks as she careens from abusive dad to milksop husband to an apprenticeship with the hippie author Ken Kesey (nicely played by Jim Belushi). She’s a traumatised work-in-progress with all of her nerve-endings showing; a wannabe writer still in search of her voice. The film shows its workings, too, in that it’s a little messy at times, with flare on the lens and strands of hair in the gate. But its mistakes and missteps are all of a piece. Perversely, they may even be the making of it.
Stewart’s debut might play as adolescent movie poetry – young in spirit, tripping over itself – but it’s also a throwback to the Nineties indie film scene, arguably the last gasp of the awkward aspiring auteur. As such, it looks more radical than it might have done in the past. It’s defiantly at odds with today’s risk-averse business model and a pure expression of the woman who made it as opposed to, say, a pin-sharp corporate commercial like Barbie. Gerwig travelled in one direction, from the grungy mumblecore movement to the mainstream. Stewart, though, is steering the opposite course, from Twilight to the arthouse, while daring the fans to stick with her, and it has made for a more fun, jolting journey. Her movie is heartfelt and unrefined and ever so slightly up itself. It's altogether precious, in both senses of the word.
‘The Chronology of Water’ is in cinemas from 6 February
