Stars at Noon

The talented Claire Denis fails to move the plot or character fast enough to maintain your interest in this languid tale of people thrown together during times of civil conflict in Nicaragua.

This may have worked if a Soderbergh or some suchlike would have gotten hold of the story but this just meanders along.

Why is there so much of Qualley naked? I get it that she is a 'hooker with a heart of gold' but why is an American prostitute in Nicaragua during a civil war?

The problem is the pacing which doesn't drive the story along considering its an actioner about a 2 'lovers' trying to flee a war zone even though US/Nicaraguan forces conspire to stop them.

Claire Denis is a major, indeed cult-level director. Her films are always challenging and often enigmatic (as well as always full of sensuality), but" Stars at Noon" (screened at the 2022 NY Film Festival) is a little too much of all that -- enigmatic is one thing, but this one is outright flummoxing. It's a film about two people who seem to meet anecdotally (but, we soon realize, maybe not so much) in, apparently, Nicaragua (within Panama standing in for it), amid a dirty war. She's American, he's a Brit, and they instantly develop a passionate attraction (she's been turning tricks, and so their first engagement is transactional, but things go on from there). They each seem to have LOTS of secrets, which complicates their relationship (and befuddles viewers) no end, especially since these seem to be to cause a lot of bad guys coming, or at least seeming to come, after both of them, or maybe just after him, for reasons that remain frustratingly unspecified.

Claire Denis' ability to fill a screen with intensity is often here, but I was expecting a more textured expression of her lifelong engagement with the asymmetries of North-South interactions, so acutely deployed in films like "Chocolat" and "Beau travail". Perhaps because she's working in English (why?) and working in Central America instead of in the African settings in which she grew up, there is a disappointing lack of specificity here -- everything is generic and , surprisingly for this director, much of it verges on cliché. (And, just to make things even more frustrating, much of the dialogue, though in English, is indecipherable, especially that of Margaret Qualley, the high-intensity She in this She/He tale -- she slurs and garbles a lot of her lines, sounding almost like a non-native speaker with some slight but unidentifiable accent, though she's supposed to be an American -- something a native-speaker director might have been at greater pains to correct.)

In the Q&A this evening, Mme Denis emphasized how much she admired. Denis Johnson's novel, making it clear that this project had been in gestation for a long time (longer still due to all the well-known barriers to getting anything done during pandemic times). Though Johnson was dead before the screenplay was written, he is given a screen-writer credit -- Mme Denis was a pains to point out that much of the dialogue was lifted verbatim from the novel. That may be part of the problem -- she speaks reasonably good English, but she perhaps lacks the ability to spot (as surely she would in French) how wooden some of the lines are, and how unnatural much of the speech.

So, despite some trademark striking Claire Denis sequences, the applause at Alice Tully Hall was pretty perfunctory (for the film -- much more enthusiasm, deservedly, for her), and I'm guessing that, of the 1,000, more or less, people there, many, like me, left scratching their heads and wondering what that had all been about, and who was doing what (onscreen and in the opaque background) to whom, and why. Despite its Grand Prix at Cannes, this, alas, will probably not go down as a masterpiece, which, coming from her, has to be a disappointment.

Claire Denis once again delivers a film of nuance, sensuality, secrecy. We are treated to excellent performances by Ms. Qualley, & Mr. Alwyn. Supporting roles by Mr. Romano, Mr. Ramirez, & Mr. Safdie contribute well. This world is one of heat, sweat, ruins.

Our protagonists are desperate people. There is subterfuge. There is danger. There's sex. There are secrets. There's heat, in the air and in their touch.

Qualley is riveting. She's on the move. Desperation emanates from her skin. Her glib retorts belie the fear darting from her wide eyes. She is relentless in her ability to look for allies.

Alwyn is at first slow, measured, calm. Later, there's anxiety building within his edifice of control. He is abandoned. He is left.

These are two people caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Each has lost their moorings. Needing each other, yet hesitant to fully trust. They are in their own singular world for which they are ill equipped & poorly prepared.

Sex brings comfort; momentary perhaps, yet with a sense of intimacy and security. They are thrown together on the run.

Denis creates a milieu of darkness, where one cannot see well. Then there cracks letting streaks of light in. Could it be love?

I get that Claire Denis may have meant well, socio-politically speaking, to have adapted this story, but I'm afraid her adaptation totally falls short of doing justice to the actual text. In my opinion, the author's intention was to portray a revolution taking place via the narrative of an affair between two characters (even unnamed, as they were that insignificant to the whole point of the book) While Denis's version recounts a tryst, with a revolution taking place in the farthest background. Despite Margaret Qualley's strong performance, the magnificent score written by Denis' long-time collaborator Tindersticks, as well as the somewhat documentary-style cinematography, the film failed at convincing me as an audience to care about either the characters or the nation acting as extras.

At the beginning we are introduced to the main character of the story who is suppose to be an American journalist in Nicaragua. She is a drunk and sleeps with men to earn money to buy shampoo !! She meets a British character and again sleeps with him for $50 !!

For the next two hours we are suppose to believe her romance with this guy and feel thrilled by their cat and mouse activities with authorities in this country. This film does not have a romantic angle nor a political intrigue to it. You have to insure long sex scenes and useless terrible story line that doesn't go anywhere. I don't understand what was Denis had in mind making this film, probably she loved the book and didn't realize 80s South America doesn't translate good to 2020s. At least she could have spend some time going through the politics of the country or the region. Once again Cannes Film Festival showed they give out their prizes based on whose turn it is to win rather than the quality of what is presented.