Review: Stars at Noon

Director:  Claire Denis

Stars:  Margaret Qualley, Benny Safdie, Joe Alwyn

The dreamy, heady, insinuatingly dangerous music of Tindersticks once again swirls around a Claire Denis picture in which damned souls find themselves isolated together in some foreign purgatory. Breaking from the French/African colonial tension of former efforts like Beau Travail and White Material, Denis here beds down (figuratively and literally) in Nicaragua circa the tail-end of COVID-19 lockdowns for a loose update of Denis Johnson’s novel of the same name. Here we find independent American journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) cast out from a band of revolutionaries she had travelled to document, now stuck in a cycle of transactional trysts as she tries to summon the resources for her next move, whatever that might be.

This may be the story of Trish but one senses really that it is Denis’ story of Qualley, who is presented here like the subject of perpetual curiosity. Denis shoots like a nature photographer who has happened upon some striking, hitherto unheard of exotic bird. What to make of this creature? This director has a reputation for the most sensuous framing of bodies. With Qualley statuesque and wandering centre frame or collapsed and crumpled on hotel bedspreads under beating fans, Denis seems perpetually fascinated by her find.

For her part, Qualley brings some of the immature, brattish charm of her Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood role to bear in the makings of Trish, but again is cast at comically inept at achieving her ends. Still, this clumsiness mostly elicits our compassion. It softens the sense of American arrogance that hovers around the character.

While Trish feels thrown out of time (like most Denis protagonists), Stars at Noon is – like Denis’ last feature Both Sides of the Blade – very specifically set within the limitations of the pandemic. Masks camouflage faces, or hang around necks. Vaccination checkpoints hinder passage. Constricting and obscuring. The threat of disease hangs over everything like a contaminant to safety and security, a tremulous counterpoint to the hot aura of distrust in the air. Trish is fervently self-reliant, but she is constantly having to scrabble to stay in place. She’s too busy staying afloat to reach the shore, more confident than she is skilled.

Trish becomes entangled with British oil representative Daniel (Joe Alwyn), and the two of them make for curious bedfellows, both avatars for western cultures viewed with contempt or mockery by the locals. Indeed, one suspects their predicament has been perpetuated by an amorphous sense of spite in the immediate populous. An improvised, unstructured cabal.

Trish’s opportunism – her circling of various hotels – speak also of the uncertain survival modes of Freelance culture. A curt, unsuccessful effort to reconnect with an editor she once burned (John C. Reilly) is pointedly representative of this. Perhaps even the wider plot of bureaucratic constraints and diplomatic snafus is similarly reflective.

The sound of hot rain persists throughout the movie, perpetuating an atmosphere of erotic potentiality, but is it successfully utilised? For all Denis’ past evidence of tactile physicality, Stars at Noon doesn’t really feel sexy. Most of Trish’s encounters with men are transactional, underpinned by the hustle. Sex is mechanical. A means to an end. Even her couplings with Daniel feel weighted. This isn’t a tale of love under pressure. More of lust born of both convenience and commiseration. Both want to make themselves feel better. There’s little sense of their feelings for one another. Still, Tindersticks make even the most inert sequences swoon.

Alas, the air of mystique surrounding Daniel never quite captures the imagination. The late entry of Benny Safdie’s unnamed roaming ‘consultant’ (read CIA man) brings this into some kind of focus, but Stars at Noon is itself more interested in the hothouse mood between its leads – their casual desperation – than it is political intrigue, espionage or corruption. If you’re eager for dense plot machinations, look elsewhere. Indeed, for a filmmaker one can often rely on for her economy, this offering is unusually listless and repetitive (though that is, certainly, part of the point).

Even if Stars at Noon feels like a rare and minor stumble in an almost-perfect career, it is also a) still better than the best efforts of many other filmmakers and b) intriguing and significant enough to warrant a theatrical cinema release. Denis’ reputation alone ought to have secured this. See also the film’s A24 pedigree in the US. But, maddeningly, the film has been dropped unceremoniously into the sea of streaming in the UK, meaning that one of Denis’ most approachable movies for casual audiences has also been rendered one of her most anonymous. The frustration is real. And while there are better entry points into her most singular and spectacular filmography, Stars at Noon deserves a better fate than this. At the very least it has arrived at an appropriate time of year; a languid compliment to our present run of hot, restless nights.