thora birch

Chronologies of Trauma

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Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.

If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.

I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.

You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, is a deceptive work of broad commercial appeal that also carries out a wicked subversive streak just below the polite charms of its genteel surface. Fried Green Tomatoes looks & acts like a Normal movie aimed to stoke mainstream America’s nostalgia for “The Good Old Days” of the vintage American South. That bait-and-switch allows the film to constantly veer into abrupt bursts of absurdist humor, grisly violence, and heartfelt lesbian romance without much of an uproar from its Normie audience. It’s that exact clash between the conventional vs. an underplayed indulgence in the bizarre that makes the movie such a treat for me. It’s both proudly traditional & wildly unpredictable, paradoxically so.

It would be difficult to recommend further viewing for audiences who want to see more films that pull off that exact balancing act between tradition & subversion. Luckily, though, Fried Green Tomatoes is not the only film around that heavily relies on the traditional charms of fierce Southern Women to sneak its own hidden agendas & indulgences past mainstream audiences’ defenses. Here are a few suggested pairings of movies you could watch if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience more cinema that falls on the quietly dark side of Southern twang.

Crazy in Alabama (1999)

In my mind, the clearest parallel to Fried Green Tomatoes‘s clash between the conventional & the morbidly bizarre is the 1999 black comedy Crazy in Alabama. The only major difference is that Fried Green Tomatoes is subtly subversive, while Crazy in Alabama is gleefully over-the-top. Melanie Griffith is flamboyant as the anchor to the film’s violent side, playing a kooky Southern Woman who poisons & decapitates her abusive husband so she can run off to become a Hollywood star (a straight-up trial-run for her future role as Honey Whitlock in John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented). Lucas Black costars as her favorite nephew, whom she left back home to deal with the exponential civil unrest of the Civil Rights 1960s. These two disparate storylines—one where an over-the-top Hollywood starlet regularly converses with her husband’s severed head (which she carries around in a hatbox) and one where a young white boy becomes a local hero by bravely declaring “Racism is bad” and attending fictional Martin Luther King, Jr rallies—are only flimsily connected by occasional phone calls shared between these two unlikely leads. It’s the same bifurcated, traditional vs. absurdist story structure as Fried Green Tomatoes, except that there’s nothing subtle at all about what it’s doing. Everything is on the surface and cranked incredibly loud (which suits my sensibilities just fine).

If you need any convincing that these movies make a good pairing, consider that Fannie Flagg, the novelist who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, has an extended cameo as a roadside diner waitress in Crazy in Alabama. Flagg’s entire purpose in her one featured scene is to cheer on Griffith’s crazed, wanted-murderer protagonist out of admiration for her breaking out of an abusive marriage in the way she personally saw best (sawing off her husband’s head). The audience has to share that baseline appreciation for wild Southern Women at their most hyper-violent to be fully on-board with either of these titles, which is partly what makes them a perfect match. Just don’t go into Crazy in Alabama expecting the same quiet, controlled hand that doles out the absurdist tangents in Fried Green Tomatoes. It’s the first feature film directed by Antonio Banderas and he eagerly allows the space for his then-spouse, Griffith, to run as wild as she pleases.

Now and Then (1995)

This suggestion is something of a cheat, since Now and Then is technically set in Indiana. However, it was filmed in Georgia and looks & feels entirely Southern to my Louisianan eyes. Like Fried Green Tomatoes, its story is bifurcated between two timelines: the increasingly cynical days of the 1990s and a rose-tinted view of a simpler past that was both more dangerous and more romantically Authentic. It even begins its feature-length flashback to “The Good Old Days” by explaining that children used to have to go on adventures & get into mischief to entertain themselves “in the days before MTV & Nintendo . . .” While the adult versions of our central group of childhood friends indulge in a distinctly 90s brand of Gen-X sarcasm (especially among Rosie O’Donnell & Demi Moore’s moody banter), their childhood versions purely ascribe to a gee-willickers coming-of-age adventurism that’s purely heartfelt & sentimental (as portrayed by child actor superstars like Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, and Gaby Hoffman). From the crisply uniform tableaus of freshly built cookie-cutter suburbs to the sequences of young girls singing Motown hits in unison while riding bicycles down dirt roads, the nostalgia on display here is lethally potent, to the point where I genuinely could not tell if this is the first time I’ve seen it. Now and Then is the exact kind of VHS-era lazy afternoon comfort viewing that feels as if it’s always been part of your DNA.

Unlike Fried Green Tomatoes & Crazy in Alabama, Now and Then doesn’t use this nostalgic charm as a cover for extreme dips into subversively morbid subject matter. If anything, it ultimately plays more like a softer, safer variation on Steven King’s nostalgia-classic Stand By Me, complete with the wistful narration track from a jaded adult who’s “seen it all.” The childhood friends at the center of the picture do launch their own D.I.Y. investigation of an unsolved murder from decades into their town’s past, one that invites ghostly seances, potentially dangerous strangers, and brief moments of lethal peril into their otherwise safe suburban lives. Mostly, though, the threats that arise during this murder mystery aren’t meant to elicit a genuine in-the-moment danger so much as they’re meant to highlight the conflicts & insecurities that haunt the girls’ variously troubled home lives and internal struggles with self-esteem. I’d most recommend Now and Then to Fried Green Tomatoes fans who’re more into that film’s nursing home visits & nightswimming intimacies than its freak train accidents and wild swerves into cannibalism. It’s a much better-behaved film overall, but an equally nostalgic one in its scene-to-scene details (including the ultra-specific 90s Girl™ fantasy of getting to smoke cigarettes with a young Brendan Fraser at his beefcakiest).

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Our one major stipulation for Movie of the Month selections is that they must be films that no one else in the crew has seen. Because bits & pieces of Fried Green Tomatoes were constantly looping on television when I was a kid, I honestly wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it all the way through before or not. Once I got into the lesbian & cannibal tangents that distinguish the film from its fellow works in the Southern Women Nostalgia canon, though, it was clear that I hadn’t actually seen it – at least not as a complete picture. In fact, I had been mistaking my memories of the title with another, unrelated work that similarly got the round-the-clock television broadcast treatment in the 1990s: Steel Magnolias.

Having now watched Fried Green Tomatoes & Steel Magnolias back-to-back in their entirety, I can confirm that they’re really nothing alike, except that they’re about the lives of fierce Southern Women. I much preferred Fried Green Tomatoes out of the pair, but Steel Magnolias was still charming in its own way. Adapted from a stage play, the film is mostly centered on the life & times of a small clique of heavily-accented women who frequent the same beauty shop (run by matriarch beautician Dolly Parton). Like a hetero precursor to Sordid Lives, much of the film’s humor derives from the Southern idiosyncrasies in the women’s mannerisms & idle banter as they gossip in the beauty salon between dye jobs & perms. The darkness that creeps into the frame springs from the women’s lives outside the salon, particularly the medical drama of a fiercely protective mother (Sally Fields) and her severely diabetic daughter (Julia Roberts) who pushes her body too far in order to live up to the Southern ideal of a traditional housewife.

The details of the medical melodrama that drives Steel Magnolias fall more into tear-jerking weepie territory than the wildly violent mood swings of Fried Green Tomatoes, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. The most outrageous the film gets in any one scene is a moment of crisis when Sally Fields has to force-feed orange juice to a deliriously over-acting Julia Roberts in the middle of a diabetic seizure. Her repeated shouts of “Drink the juice, Shelby!” had me howling, and I’m sure that scene is just as iconic in some irony circles as “No wire hangers, ever!” is in others. All told, though, that storyline is too sobering & sad to mock at length, and you have to genuinely buy into the dramatic tragedy of the narrative to appreciate the film on its own terms. I won’t say it’s as convincing of a dramatic core as the unspoken lesbian romance of Fried Green Tomatoes, but it’s effective in its own, smaller way. Anyone with endless room in their hearts for Southern Women as a cultural archetype should be able to appreciate both films enough for Steel Magnolias to survive the comparison.

-Brandon Ledet