The Stars at Noon – first-look review

There’s some­thing about the cin­e­ma of Claire Denis that’s so imme­di­ate and pri­mal that it’s hard to imag­ine her want­i­ng to mount a lav­ish Eng­lish-lan­guage peri­od fea­ture adapt­ed from a piece of high-end lit­er­ary pulp. Her inter­est in the land­scape of the body, the tac­tile poten­tial of flesh and skin (par­tic­u­lar­ly when two bod­ies con­nect) and the psy­chol­o­gy of love, has always yield­ed results that range from the sub­lime to the tran­scen­dent – all across an oeu­vre in which she has sel­dom if ever missed.

There’s a com­mon rota­tion, too, for how press and crit­ics process her work, often baf­fled and repelled at the ini­tial fes­ti­val screen­ing, and then lat­er, under­stand­ing and recog­ni­tion is grad­u­al­ly drawn out until the film is final­ly placed with­in her unique cin­e­mat­ic project.

Her new one, The Stars at Noon, is some­thing of a stress test for all these pro­vi­sos, as it sees the sen­su­al­ly-inclined mae­stro upping sticks to Pana­ma – which acts as a stand in for Nicaragua – for this screen ren­der­ing of Denis Johnson’s laud­ed 1986 nov­el that charts a tor­rid, polit­i­cal­ly-charged love affair at a time of revolution.

One imag­ines to save on spi­ralling pro­duc­tion costs, the book has been stripped back to its core nar­ra­tive and rough­ly updat­ed to present day, as the Sandenista / Con­tra con­flict of ​’70s and ​’80s is replaced by more gener­ic polit­i­cal schisms and is set dur­ing the time of a (if not the) Covid pan­dem­ic. It’s easy to imag­ine a stu­dio hack refus­ing to step off the plane for less than $50, $60 mil­lion to make a prop­er ver­sion of this nov­el, yet it’s clear here that Denis is mak­ing the film she’s able to make with the bud­get provided.

With her abid­ing inter­est­ing in the inter­per­son­al ten­sions of colo­nial rule cou­pled with the erot­i­cal­ly-charged nature of the nov­el, it’s easy to see why Denis would be inter­est­ed in this mate­r­i­al. And, for her, it’s a very faith­ful adap­ta­tion, fol­low­ing Mar­garet Qualley’s nymphette press attaché Trish John­son who chugs rum while sleep­ing around with var­i­ous mil­i­tary offi­cials and local politi­cians in order to retain her press cre­den­tials. If any­thing, it might be con­sid­ered too faith­ful, as there’s much more of a focus on plot than is cus­tom­ary for her films, and the drift­ing atmos­pher­ics of yore have been replaced by a nar­ra­tive struc­ture that is dis­arm­ing­ly rigorous.

Qual­ley is game and is ful­ly open to the require­ments of her char­ac­ter, as she spends much of the film in a state of skimpy undress, dap­pled head to toe in sweat and attempt­ing to exude con­fi­dence beyond her years. Her per­for­mance does the job, but is per­haps a lit­tle too self-con­scious and emo­tion­al­ly forth­right to real­ly hit home, and she too often comes across like a sharp-tongued twen­tysome­thing back­pack­er try­ing her luck in for­eign climes than a femme fatale danc­ing between the shad­ows of immi­nent dan­ger. Joe Alwyn, as the smoky-voiced Brit who falls in with Trish, is too young to con­vince as a high-rank­ing mem­ber of an Oil con­glom­er­ate look­ing to desta­bilise the region.

And yet, the film still some­how works as an ultra-sin­cere lip-quiv­er­ing piece of semi-soft­core (think Zal­man King’s VHS clas­sic, Wild Orchid, with Mick­ey Rourke and Car­ré Otis) whose cen­tral dynam­ic is shaped by the shift­ing sands of polit­i­cal upheaval. The chem­istry between Trish and Daniel is potent enough to main­tain inter­est, even if it lacks for the earth-shat­ter­ing grav­i­ty of the most suc­cess­ful screen romances.

There are some Denis sta­ples, such as a jazz-tinged Tin­der­sticks score, a dole­ful mid-point dance sequence, and many clos­es-ups of gyrat­ing naked bod­ies wrapped in embrace. Even so, it does feel like some­thing of an out­lier in Denis’ back cat­a­logue, with arti­fice trump­ing atmos­pher­ics to an extent where it appears as if she may have con­scious­ly been attempt­ing some­thing very dif­fer­ent this one. Even though this one didn’t quite land on first view­ing, I can’t wait to see it again out­side the hyper­bol­ic land­scape of the fes­ti­val circuit.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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