Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022) (Patreon)

It's been an odd year for Claire Denis. Her film from Berlin, Both Sides of the Blade, was a French star vehicle in the lineage of Chabrol, weighted down by a seriousness that neither of its formidable leads, Vincent Lindon or Juliette Binoche, could convincingly pull off. Where that film displayed histrionics within an essentially realist shell, Denis' English-language effort Stars at Noon is simultaneously recessive and unruly. Based on a novel by Denis Johnson, Stars at Noon bears more than a passing resemblance to A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion's 1977 novel about a woman of privilege drifting through a wartorn Central American nation searching for herself. That woman, Charlotte Douglas, was dismissively referred to by the militant locals as the "norteamericana cunt." 

Someone more directly, various characters call Trish (Margaret Qualley), the itinerant journalist and revolutionary hanger-on, a "whore." To be fair, Trish does sleep with men for money, but as the film makes clear -- one of the only things it does make clear, in fact -- Trish's sexual capitulation is more a matter of survival than money, although she needs that too. Protected from violence by two local benefactors -- a military subcommandante (Nick Romano) and an elderly politician (Stephan Proaño) -- Trish's precarious situation finally crumbles when she meets, and instantly fucks, a mysterious British businessman, Daniel (Joe Alwyn).

Like Didion, Denis seems intent on working with gaps and silences. Adam Nayman (who likes this film much more than I do) has likened it to L'Intrus, Denis' notoriously abstruse portrait of an old-world spy traveling to Korea for a heart transplant. But whatever one thinks of L'Intrus (I quite admire it), there's never any doubt that Denis has made exactly the film she wanted to, and than any secrets it refused to reveal were very much by design. Frankly I'm not sure that's the case with Stars at Noon. Through much of the run time, I felt that I recognized productive moments of ambiguity, as well as strange lapses in basic coherence, and I could not always tell them apart from each other.

One thing that is quite purposeful is Denis' decision to re-situate Johnson's narrative. The novel was set in 1980s Nicaragua, during Daniel Ortega's government and the armed revolt of the CIA-backed Contras. Denis retains a lot of that iconography -- men in fatigues with guns, stationed everywhere; wads of near-worthless Cordobas thrown around like Kleenex -- but places Stars at Noon in the present, even going so far as incorporating Covid masks and vaccines. Was Denis comparing the pandemic to a more familiar form of political instability? It's hard to say, because so little is made of politics in any explicit way. This is miles away from Transit, Christian Petzold's meticulous combination of Nazi Germany and the present day. Instead, it feels negligible and a bit lazy.

To be fair, setting Stars at Noon in the present does seem to suggest allegorical potential. Daniel, the interloper who has attracted such attention from those in power in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica, claims to be a representative of a British oil company, in country looking for investment. It's never clear whether this is true, or it's his cover and he is actually some sort of covert agent. But indeed, this could be the point. Whereas the 70s and 80s in Latin America were still defined by ideologies, now "revolution" is strictly market-based, and corporate espionage is just another function of the CIA. In a lovely minor role, Benny Safdie embodies this breezy ambivalence. A spook who introduces himself to Trish as a consultant, he is only half lying.

But there are some basic elements that seem to be missing in Stars at Noon, so much so that some critics speculated that the editing was a rush-job to make the deadline for Cannes. Not sure about that, but there are several awkward lapses in spatial continuity, but not deployed often enough to suggest a formal strategy. Certain very basic plot points -- was Trish trying to betray Daniel in Costa Rica, and if so, how exactly? -- are illegible to no obvious end. One final fillip of comic tonal inconsistency arrives near the end of the film, when a random man in a barroom, seemingly oblivious to the violence around him, starts waving his arms and dancing in circles around Trish. A nod to the greatest five minutes in the Denis oeuvre? Who knows.

While watching Stars at Noon, I more than once thought of a very different film, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights. Like Stars at Noon, Wong's film was received at the time as an ill-conceived attempt at mainstream, English-language filmmaking, a valiant attempt by one of cinema's most distinctive stylists to shoehorn his talents into a more accessible container. Since its disastrous Cannes debut, My Blueberry Nights has gains a champion or two, but it mostly remains an odd blip in an otherwise sterling career. Denis' film, by contrast, has proven divisive; a number of perspicacious critics are going to bat for it, and why not? It certainly displays Denis' unmatched knack for woozy, desire-drunk ambiance. (Although by this point, the use of Tindersticks on the soundtrack is in danger of becoming self-parody, Denis' own Spiegel im Spiegel.)

But overall, I expect Stars at Noon will become an auteurist curiosity, a film that will play fairly well in retrospectives, as an example of Denis' unique vision pitched in a minor key. And it may well show other directors that Qualley is versatile enough to convey genuine emotional dissolution, her youthful self-confidence supplanted by a twitchy form of sexualized anxiety, a woman who never enters a room without locating another way out. This was an experiment, one we could call an interesting failure perhaps, but by no means a waste of time.