At the beginning of Stars at Noon, American journalist Trish gazes longingly at a faded, black-and-white photograph of Nicaraguan resistance fighters, framed and pinned to the wall of the gloomy Managua hotel room where she has business-like intercourse. “Young rebels used to be so sexy,” she sighs. It’s a direct swipe at the indescribable army lieutenant that was upon her at the moment, but also a callback to what might be remotely perceived as a more romantic, mysterious age of global political turmoil — the kind that Graham Greene’s novels and films like The Year of Dangerous Living, a seductive realm of fiction that may have propelled Trish so far from home in the first place. Claire Denis revives that dirty glamor in this dank, heady foreign America thriller, but she’s nowhere near as naïve or nostalgic as her young protagonist.
The now article-free Stars at Noon updates the late Denis Johnson’s 1984 novel The Stars at Noon to the COVID-stricken present, showing that young rebels – and civil servants and outlaws and seedy international oilmen and loafers who don’t know exactly what they are – can still be very sexy in fact. Not least when they’re played with teasing, taciturn ten-drinks-down chemistry, albeit with salt on their skin and dirt under their nails, by such gorgeous performers as Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn. But the world was unappealingly corrupt in 1984 and remains so today: Johnson’s prediction in the novel of a “hyper-new, far left future coming at us at the speed of rock ‘n’ roll” has not come true.
Denis and co-authors Lea Mysius and Andrew Litvack moved the author’s convoluted narrative of political hostilities, corporate espionage and romantic redemption forward almost four decades from its original milieu and didn’t have to change much — although the political details of the novel did have to do something declined while the romantic ones have slid forward. After all, it’s sexier that way.
30 or 40 years ago, Johnson’s novel might have been a sizzling big-studio romantic thriller sold to the spectacle of hot A-list stars and exotic Central American locations – and in that light, Stars at Noon may seem like such a surprising project for veteran French sensualist Denis, whose genre-focused projects still relied more on tactile detail than nerve-wracking set pieces. But it’s also not hard to see what drew her to Johnson’s short, snappy book, which delves into the psychology of being a white misfit in a country shaking off a history of colonization and foreign dependency – a subject Denis, the Raised in colonial West Africa, she has dabbled in films from her debut Chocolate to 2009’s riotous White Material. The American environment and perspective may be new to them; the rest, from the film’s bristly, dusty atmosphere to its frankly physical eroticism to another chilling, enveloping score by longtime Tindersticks collaborators, is vintage Denis.
“White Material” may actually have been an alternate title for “Stars at Noon,” describing the outfit that posh, soft-spoken Englishman Daniel (Alwyn) wears for most of the film’s leisurely run: a perfectly tailored summer suit ivory-colored linen, the symbol of Western colonialists who, with cool pretentiousness, slack off through countries where they don’t belong. It’s so pristine you can practically hear the countdown to the moment it gets badly soiled, first with mud and then with blood. As a consultant for a British oil company doing business in Nicaragua, he doesn’t want to disclose — he’s effectively passing covert industry information between competing countries — Daniel instills, at least initially, a calm sense of purpose as he strolls Managua’s seedy streets and in In contrast, elegant hotel lobbies.
In reality, he’s as helpless as Trish (Qualley), a Washington DC transplant who claims to be an international journalist even though it’s been a long time since she’s had an assignment. Virtually stranded in the country, tucked away in a seedy motel and chugging through bottles of rum every day, she survives by sleeping with visitor suits and local officials for hard-to-get dollars — more valuable than her stash on Cordoba’s black market. When she and Daniel meet in a hotel bar one night, what seems like an uncomplicated transaction quickly turns into an unstoppable attraction. Unable to separate, their respective tense situations — she struggles to get her passport back from prickly Nicaraguan authorities, he appears to be being pursued by Costa Rican cops and CIA agents — merge into a shared, doubled-down danger, and she make a joint door-or-die dash for the border.
The stakes are high, the tension suitably heated, but “Stars at Noon” doesn’t keep stepping on the gas. During Trish and Daniel’s passionate, ill-planned escape, Denis makes time for one characteristically structured, mood-driven pit stop after another: a stroll through a fly-infested street market, the conversation at a point glimpsed by a parade of passing mourners carrying umbrellas or a key confrontation at a makeshift COVID testing site, of all places. Finally, the clock freezes for everyone’s Denis-esque flourish: a breathlessly sultry slow dance across an empty, sticky, violet-lit nightclub floor, to a Claves-heavy theme song sung with gruff yearning by Stuart Staples.
The finely-featured blonde Alwyn, who has inherited a role passed down by Taron Egerton and before him by former Denis muse Robert Pattinson, is perhaps the ideal physical incarnation of a man described by Trish – in one of lots of sharp, salty lines she gifted the script – as “so know it’s like fucking a cloud”. He is an intentionally gauzy, difficult-to-hold character played by the actor in an apt, alluringly mysterious manner. But Trish is the plum part here, and a sensational Qualley — pedaling through a tattered thrift closet, with a luscious halo of dark curls that can’t help but remind you of her mother, Andie MacDowell — reaches for it with both calloused hands.
Trish considers herself a worldly femme fatale in some ways, but her immature, ugly American despair betrays her time and time again. Qualley’s crooked, whirling performance nails that conflict, from the hard-nosed dialogue she delivers with just the right touch of mock cool – Trish enjoying her own savoir-faire too much to be natural – to the the clumsy gait that slips into a strut only when she remembers. In carrying this massive film, Qualley joins a promising club of Denis’ handpicked leading actors, including Vincent Lindon, Isabelle Huppert and the recent triple Juliette Binoche. Wherever the filmmaker goes from here – and between the charged chamber drama of “Both Sides of the Blade” and the freaky sci-fi experimentalism of “High Life,” who can really say – one’s more hoping that she’s the 27-year-old takes old star with her. As it turns out, the young rebels are pretty handsome.
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