Stars at Noon: Claire Denis’ Ideals-Free Thriller About Lovers in a Dangerous Place

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

Claire Denis’ latest, Stars at Noon, tied for the runner-up Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last May. Yet the critical reception for the esteemed 76-year-old French director has been uncharacteristically tepid.

Billed misleadingly as a “romantic thriller,” the film is neither romantic nor especially thrilling. The characters are enigmatic to the point of superficiality, the relationships are largely transactional and the action toggles between languid and frazzled over two-and-a-quarter hours.

Trish (Margaret Qualley) and her mystery-man/sex partner in Stars at Noon

But with some reflective distance, away from the snap judgment of festivals, Stars at Noon proves a pretty interesting film, if a sometimes confusing one. Denis is clearly about upending expectations, taking the thriller tropes and drawing them back to her own areas of concern: colonialism, the complexity of erotic relations and gender roles.

The script, by Denis and co-writers Léa Mysius and Andrew Litvack is cleverly adapted from Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel, which was set during Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution, a cause that was widely hailed by the American left at the time.

In recent years, the revolutionary government has evolved into an authoritarian state that cracks down on critical journalists and activists, many of whom have fled. This makes it exactly the right place to examine the global loss of political idealism.

Margaret Qualley stars as Trish, a young American who arrived as a would-be activist/journalist, and who has offended the government with her writing.

Now, without resources, she has driftedinto selective prostitution, both for cash and protection from the military. Her clients include a young army lieutenant, who holds her American passport, and an elderly government bureaucrat, both of whom say they’re running out of favours to do for her.

Trish carries herself with a skittish perkiness and talks in snappy one-liners, as if playing a journalist from a vintage movie like The Front Page, a character from a different time, trying to treat precariousness as comedy. In actuality, she drifts from day to day, in a crummy Managua motel with no wi-fi or air conditioning, struggling to get enough money to get out of the country and back to the States.

The waifish Qualley (HBO’s The Leftovers, Netflix’s Maid, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) could pass for a teenager, which heightens our sense of her character’s vulnerability, as does the way she anesthetizes herself by drinking from breakfast to bedtime.

For background reasons that are vague, she has apparently burned her journalistic contacts. John C. Reilly appears briefly as a disheveled editor on a Skype call, who tells her to get lost and stop bothering him with her ideas for lifestyle and travel stories.

“Admit it! You’re not a journalist,” he bellows at her, fom the middle-aged perspective of someone who only knows what that used to mean.

Enter Trish’s potential rescuer, Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a blond, posh Englishman in a white linen suit who she meets in a bar and soon accompanies to his hotel room. After they’ve had sex, she assures him she didn’t come to his room for the agreed-upon $50 fee, but for the chance to use his air-conditioning (she also steals a roll of his toilet paper).

Daniel is vague about his work (something to do with oil), but he appeals to her with his honest and relatable fatalism. “I commit adultery often,” he says glumbly. “I never really miss anybody. I feel like I’m in danger of throwing my life away.”

Still, they have a sexual connection, and like each other enough to pass for romance. When Trish sees Daniel talking to a local, whom she knows as an undercover Costa Rican cop (Danny Ramirez working against the government, she warms him that the connection is dangerous.

They decide to make a run for the Costa Rican borner in a hot-wired car that, like the plot, stalls and accelerates in an erratic fashion. There’s lots of time for more drinks and sex, with the characters feeling each other and feeling each other out, complete with scratched backs, sticky sweat and menstrual blood.

The shimmery lounge-jazz and soul score by Denis’ longtime collaborators Tindersticks plays in the background and, in a beautifiul dance scene, as time oozes by in a film that seems less suspenseful than suspended.

Gradually, the net starts to close around them in the film’s last third. At a hotel at breakfast time, Trish meets a friendly American (filmmaker Benny Safdie, plausibly unctuous) who describes himself as a “consultant” and mocks the vagueness of the term.

Trish, who’s observant despite her lack of other practical life skills, promptly identifies him as CIA. He’s after Daniel, the man whose white suit keeps getting dirtier as the movie progresses and the action accelerates.

On one hand, yes, Stars at Noon is about (nothing new here) how human beings are but play tokens for international governments and multi-national corporations. It’s also a film about the junction where the personal meets the political in a state of anomie, whick Merriam-Webster defines as “social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values,” and, in a secondary meaning, “personal unrest and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals.”

Stars at Noon. Directed by Claire Denis. Screenplay by Claire Denis, Lea Mysius, Andrew Litvack, based on the novel by Denis Johnson. Stars Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Benny Safdie and Danny Ramirez. In theatres in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Saskatoon and Edmonton, and on VOD on Friday, Oct. 14.