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

23/100

Spectacularly misjudged in almost every way. I haven't read The Stars at Noon ("Drop the 'the.' Just Stars at Noon. It's cleaner") and am far from an expert on Nicaraguan history, but nonetheless feel confident that transplanting Johnson's 1984-set political-thriller narrative to the present day renders it fundamentally toothless. "Ehh, corruption's corruption and Ortega's Ortega," Denis evidently figured, which would be fair enough if her film felt remotely curious about its protagonist's reason for being there in the first place, or even about why she's now unable to leave. The journalism's clearly mostly bullshit, but what was it a cover for? As is, Trish makes so little psychological sense, both as written and as somewhat manically performed by Qualley, that she seems to have just been magically dropped in Managua à la Dorothy in Oz. I gather that Johnson deliberately created a cipher in his unnamed narrator, but she seems to have been, on the page, judging from descriptions*, a woman of strong convictions and uncertain motives, with a shady background; Trish, by contrast, never seems credible on any level except the carnal, and whatever internal struggle she may experience when the CIA comes calling remains opaque. (John C. Reilly's cameo as Trish's not-really-editor, in which he looks like he's Facetiming in during a quick break on Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule, does not help.) 

Granted, Denis chose to foreground the lovers-on-the-run aspect, but she whiffs that as well. I'm not sure whether Johnson wrote dialogue that works when read but not when spoken, or whether Qualley and Alwyn were both badly miscast, but their ostensible romantic badinage clangs like a motherfucker—every line feels at once artificial and banal, somehow, as if a computer program had been asked to generate witty, torrid exchanges from a database of '80s Body Heat knockoffs. Nor is the film sensually enthralling, unless you're into the good ol' tangle-of-disembodied-limbs approach to shooting sex scenes. There's so little heat between these two that Trish's ultimate decision has zero friction, if you'll forgive me reversing cause and effect in that hastily conceived metaphor. And how does Denis attempt to suggest otherwise in her movie's final shot? How does she signify the protagonist's anguish/shame, or lack thereof, or whatever emotional affect we'd care to project? By having her look directly into the camera lens. Swear to god I am going to lose my fucking mind if filmmakers don't stop using that as a get-out-of-my-uncertainty-about-how-the-hell-to-end-this-thing-free card. Also, enough with Tindersticks in my opinion. They're great, but the way that Denis leans on them for woozy atmosphere is starting to feel lazy. Let's get some Commodores-style needle drops back in the mix. 

* Obviously, extrapolating from contemporaneous reviews of the source material isn't the ideal way to analyze a film. This one is just so blatantly off, though, that I was compelled to get at least a vague sense of how its story and characters were originally intended to function. Nobody would create these 137 minutes from scratch; they could only exist by bouncing poorly off of something else.