Sucking in my sorrow

The Cannes showed the "water chronology" - the directorial debut of Kristen Stuart, shot in Latvia. It turned out a bitter portrait of overcoming the injury

The program “Special View”, the second most important in the hierarchy of the Cannes festival, was shown by the full -length debut of actress Kristen Stuart. She transferred to the screen the autobiographical book of the American writer Lydia Yuknavic “Chronology of Water”. The Stuart film was added to the program at the very last moment, and there were rumors in Cannes that this was a weak picture. Kinocritic Irina Karpova believes that Stuart shaved the doubters and confidently declared herself in a new quality - not afraid of the director’s experiments.

The main property of the “water chronology” is Kristen Stuart and Lidia Yuknavic - it does not have a linear chronology.

Lydia Yuknavic’s book begins with birth. Lydia gave birth to a dead girl. “When it turned out that life inside me froze, it was better to give birth to a natural way-they told me that way. <...> The birth lasted 38 hours ” (the translation into Russian hereinafter - Elena Gnedovskaya, in Russia, the recently closed publishing house of feminist literature Nokidding Press has published the book. The language is a metaphor for experience, Yuknavic writes, and Kristen Stuart faced a difficult directorial task to transfer this Yuknavich language to the screen - accurate, tough, not knowing false shame when it comes to the body. "I was torn from the vagina to the anus and sewn up."

Stuart calls himself a “pseudo -student” writer: after reading the book, she flew to the Oregon, where Yuknavic lived, they met and made friends.

Yuknavic readers are known for poems and stories, and a wider circle is a performance on Ted Talk about the beauty to be an outsider, an outcast.

Misfit, literally from English - one who cannot fit into the framework of normality or to whom it is given with great difficulty.

Kristen Stuart took eight years - she rewritten the script again and again (“I shot 500 films,” says Stuart herself about this process), “to show the transformation of a young woman who does not fit into the framework of a young woman looking for salvation in water and vodka. In them, she tries to dissolve childhood injury.

An ever-missing alcoholic mother, constantly punishing and sexualizing her father. From the age of 6, Yuknavic was engaged in swimming and was close to getting to the Olympic team. She was supposed to participate in the Olympics-80 in Moscow, but the American team refused to come to the communist capital due to the boycott. Lydia managed to slip into the needle ear - the best universities in America offered her, an ambitious swing, a scholarship to study, but her father did not want to hear about snob universities. Only when he was not at home, the mother signed permission, letting Lydia into Texas Technical University.

“I wanted to escape, and my mother helped me. At that moment I almost loved her, ”Lydia writes. At the university, she will get acquainted with drugs and her first husband, they will move to the democratic staff of Oregon. And when her life seems to be going on a safe trajectory, everything will again destroy the birth of a dead daughter. Lydia will plunge into psychosis, begins to fill the notebooks with fragments of phrases and ideas. To calm down and “ground”, she will surround herself with a sea pebble, stones and shells turned out by the sea.

Smooth pebbles, which flow from the female body, blood and water, lake and sea - all this becomes symbols in the Odyssey of the heroine returning home (only she has no house at home).

Stuart finds a cinematic equivalent to each of these literary images, and together they give birth to a sad, almost transparent melody of pain and restoration.

The English actress Imozhen Poths, playing Lydia, tears away from herself a piece to put the words “woman” and “pain” from them. Its transformation to Lydia is difficult to measure by acting prizes, but when viewing, I really want it to get them all - this is fearless work.

The film was shot by a 16 mm film, and the shooting took 32 days, several of them in Malta, and the main time in Latvia. The beaches of Oregon and the water of the Atlantic played the coast of the Baltic Sea. City prices in New York and San Diego-everything was shot at the site in Latvia. “Film culture is born in Latvia, ” says Stewart in an interview with Hollywood Reporter. - I like how we make films in the States, but I needed to radically distance myself from this. I wanted to make a student film. And this is impossible to do in America. ”

But this Stewart spoke last year, a year before the premiere in Cannes. I am sure that now it is unlikely that it would occur to anyone to call her film student.