“I can’t wait to make 10 more movies,” Kristen Stewart said the morning after making what Rolling Stone magazine called “one hell of a directorial debut” at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nor can film critics, judging from the rave reviews of The Chronology of Water, her startling take on the American swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s visceral memoir of surviving abuse as a child.
All the producers who Stewart said passed on her script, saying its subject matter made it “really unattractive” to audiences, must now be crying into their champagne.
Variety magazine called it “a stirring drama of abuse and salvation, told with poetic passion”, while Indiewire critic David Ehrlich said “there isn’t a single millisecond of this movie that does not bristle with the raw energy of an artist”.
The fact that she has got such notices with what is normally a no-no subject in Hollywood – and with an avant-garde approach to the storytelling – is remarkable.