The anatomy of Kristen Stewart's awkward, endearing standing ovation at Cannes

Yahoo

23-05-2025

CANNES, France — Clocking the length of standing ovations has become something of a competitive sport at the Cannes Film Festival. But what's often lost in announcing who got six minutes and who got eight is the fun of what happens during the standing O. It's perhaps the one moment in our social media-ed, meme-ified world when we can watch celebrities at their most human.
Yes, actors are used to performing and they often love attention, but few souls on this planet are prepared for the experience of having a theater full of hundreds or even a couple thousand people standing and staring at them, clapping, while also having their every reaction projected on a movie screen in front of them, in real time.
Perhaps no one is better at being an awkward human in public than Kristen Stewart, who squirmed and shrugged her way through a six-minute standing ovation at the premiere of her feature directorial debut, 'The Chronology of Water,' which screened late Friday night and finished early Saturday.
Stewart is no stranger to Cannes. She started coming to the festival in 2014 with 'Clouds of Sils Maria,' opposite this year's jury president, Juliette Binoche. Stewart has been on the jury herself, and festival head Thierry Frémaux once dubbed her 'the queen of Cannes.' In 2018, she started a footwear equality revolution at the festival by pointedly taking off her Louboutin stilettos on the red carpet, leading to the end of an unofficial requirement that women wear high heels at the major gala premieres.
So when her long-awaited film wasn't announced as part of the Cannes schedule in early April, people began speculating. It had to be a total disaster, right?
No, it turns out Stewart was racing to finish it and managed to get accepted a couple weeks later as part of the festival's Un Certain Regard competition for first- and second-time filmmakers. (It's a big year for actors transitioning to directing. Directorial debuts from Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson are also in that prestigious sidebar competition.)
Stewart actually married her longtime partner Dylan Meyer, who's a producer of the film, just before her Cannes acceptance was announced. ('My girl,' she called Meyer in her screening intro.) So she was coming to the festival as a newlywed, and looking totally punk rock in a white blazer with white shorts and bleach blond hair streaked with hot pink.
Stewart has spent eight years trying to adapt Lidia Yuknavitch's bracingly raw, impressionistic 2011 memoir, which recounts in bloody, poetic detail her brutal childhood with a sexually abusive father and the swimming, drugs and writing that she used to try to find her way to the surface.
Stewart also gave herself the extra challenge of shooting in 16mm and deviates far and wide from the source material, telling Lidia's story in what feels like a totally improvised visual language of extreme close-ups and images that seem to be viewed through water, as a way of stitching together fragmented, nonlinear memories.
It's a herculean task — trying to take a memoir so personal and internal and bring viewers into that experience. Plus, in this film, Stewart is asking an audience to sit for 2 hours and 8 minutes with a lead character (played by Imogen Poots) who is in every frame and is, at many points, practically bursting out of the screen with rage and charm and self-destruction. The film will get a lot of comparisons to last year's 'The Outrun,' another addiction story, starring Saoirse Ronan, but Stewart smartly lays out Lidia's childhood early on, which helps build empathy for the terror she'll later wreak on herself and everyone who tries to help her. And Poots as Lidia is mesmerizing. Funny, smart, broken, an absolute a--hole at times, but always someone you're trying to root for.
'I want to speak plainly just for one second,' Stewart said in a curse-laden speech introducing the screening, her voice cracking with emotion. 'This was a radical act of love.' She thanked everyone in the theater for lending their minds and bodies to the movie, which would only just expand its life and the experience. And she thanked her star, 'Swimogen Poots,' but especially Yuknavitch.
Addressing Yuknavitch, who was not in France, she said: 'Thank you for the trickle, thank you for the gush, thank you for everything.' Then she told everyone it was time to rip off the Band-Aid and just watch the movie.
When the lights came up, the crowd hooted and roared, but it didn't feel like a normal standing ovation.
It felt like witnessing the christening of a new chapter in the life of someone we'd watched grow up.
'There isn't a single millisecond of this movie that doesn't bristle with the raw energy of an artist who's found the permission she needed to put her whole being into every frame, messy and shattered as that might be,' Indiewire's David Ehrlich wrote, raving about the film's audacity and Stewart's ability to commune with Lidia on 'a subatomic level,' even while acknowledging that it doesn't always work.
Variety's Owen Glieberman wrote about the 'visual fearlessness' that allowed Stewart to communicate the horrors of Lidia's abuse without ever showing it, and Rolling Stone's David Fear called it 'one hell of a directorial debut.' (The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was more tepid, calling it heartfelt with some 'callow indie indulgences.' One should note that male critics dominate the ranks of most major outlets covering Cannes, which is a battle for another day.)
Gala premieres for the biggest movies play to an audience of 2,300 in the festival's biggest theater, the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Stewart's film and the other Un Certain Regard movies, though, play to a crowd of 600 in the more modest Debussy theater, and there's no stadium-like live feed of the directors and stars being projected on the very screen that their movie just played on.
That act, of watching your standing O while you're experiencing it, often leads to people playing to the crowd, as the camera focuses in turn on each cast member, who each get their own set of cheers and screams. Without the cameras, though, Stewart was the sole focus of attention, and easy to spot in her all-white outfit.
So, how did she react as the minutes ticked on?
At first, Stewart went down the line of her cast and crew, hugging each of them as if it were an Olympic sport in which she got points for the fierceness and sincerity of her grip. In between hugs, she tucked her hair behind her ear and stared down.
Then she got to Poots and made the 'I bow down to you!' gesture, before throwing her arms out to her sides to get the crowd to cheer for Poots even louder, and jumping up and down. Thora Birch, who plays Lidia's sister, got a hug next. Kim Gordon, the musician formerly of Sonic Youth who plays a counselor in a rehab center, got a hug and a backrub.
Was it over? No! It was not!
Soon, Stewart had run out of people to hug. She walked back to her seat and bounced on her toes, clasping her hands and staring down again.
The applause kept going. Stewart turned to Poots and they did a little secret handshake. More playing with her hair and tucking it behind her ears. She mouthed something to Poots that looked like, 'We should go, right?'
Like magic, Stewart produced a white baseball cap and threw it on her head. She danced around. She applauded Poots. She crossed her arms like, 'Yeah, we did that.' Then she turned back to Poots and pretended to faint, as though she were that blown away with her performance. Was it over? No! That was minute one!
Suddenly, Stewart burst forward, practically running straight into the arms of Frémaux. She may be the only first-time filmmaker in Cannes history who has bear-hugged the head of the festival, who lifted her up as if she were his daughter.
Stewart waved at the balcony and danced back to her seat. When Frémaux approached with a microphone, she initially waived him off. 'No, nah, I'm fine,' she said (if we're lip-reading correctly) before shrugging and leaning down to Frémaux's hands, still holding the mic. 'No, just thank you,' she said. 'No, I mean I left it all on the — I don't have anything else to say right now. Just thank you for being here, and thank you for letting us be here.'
When someone from the balcony shouted, Stewart finally relented and took the mic, sweeping the hat off her head in the process. 'I got to say so much. [I mean], I got to say some stuff that I wanted to say.'
Then she turned to Poots. 'Babe,' she said, handing the mic forward. 'I mean, truly your body is the movie.'
Poots called her 'the best director' and seemed so uncomfortable with the mic that Stewart grabbed it back, now full of confidence, and paced along her row like a stand-up comedian doing crowd work.
'My bad, my bad, my bad,' she said to Poots, laughing. Now, to the crowd. 'No, it's an absolutely insane and surreal experience to be able to be here and watch this with all of you guys. I mean, we finished the movie, like, you know, five minutes ago.'
Now whispering, to laughter: 'It's not even finished yet.'
She continued, to the crowd. 'But yeah, we just slipped under this f---ing shut door, and' — back to Frémaux — '... thank you. We got so lucky.'
Now back to the crowd. 'And all of you, for being here.'
And with that, she quickly handed the mic back to Frémaux, conferred with Poots and Birch, smiling, and bolted for the door.