Stars at Noon

Soaked in sweat and bathed in orange light, Claire Denis’s sec­ond Eng­lish lan­guage fea­ture, Stars at Noon, is a film that seems to exist in a state of per­ma­nent dusk. Char­ac­ters are intro­duced in a relaxed, mat­ter-of-fact man­ner, with names and occu­pa­tions inten­tion­al­ly obscured. It doesn’t help that our hero­ine, Trish, played by Mar­garet Qual­ley, is con­stant­ly in a rum-induced haze. 

Rail thin and run­ning on alco­hol and sex, Trish wears the dis­guise of a good time girl while qui­et­ly yearn­ing to be saved from her sit­u­a­tion. Strand­ed in Nicaragua after arriv­ing on assign­ment as a jour­nal­ist, Trish has basi­cal­ly giv­en up on writ­ing. All she seems to want to do is get out, with no choice but to bar­gain with the men around her for pro­tec­tion and sur­vival. It’s a time of gov­ern­men­tal and soci­etal unrest in the coun­try and no one seems to care about a way­ward Amer­i­can woman in over her head.

Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a mys­te­ri­ous Eng­lish­man in Nicaragua on busi­ness. The two meet, flirt, fuck, and then quick­ly become polit­i­cal­ly inter­twined. The screen­play, writ­ten by Denis with Léa Mysius and Andrew Lit­vack, is delib­er­ate­ly sparse. We don’t know why Trish is stuck, we don’t know why Daniel seems to be a per­son of inter­est to the gov­ern­ment there and we also don’t know why the two are so drawn to each other.

The nov­el the film is based on, writ­ten by Denis John­son, orig­i­nal­ly took place dur­ing the Nicaraguan Rev­o­lu­tion in 1984. Denis’s film takes place in present day, even acknowl­edg­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic with char­ac­ters often being masked in pub­lic spaces. This is a sig­nif­i­cant change and yet, much like the book (which doesn’t even name the film’s cen­tral pair), the film refus­es to direct­ly reveal to the audi­ence what exact­ly is going on. It’s the kind of sto­ry that one can only assess in the macro sense, with­out get­ting hung up on every minute detail.

Stars at Noon is most con­cerned with the move­ment of the lovers dur­ing their time togeth­er, with min­i­mal, con­ver­sa­tion­al dia­logue in between. It’s unclear whether it’s love, lust, des­per­a­tion or some com­bi­na­tion of these ele­ments that keep Trish and Daniel togeth­er. Qual­ley gives a full-bod­ied per­for­mance, throw­ing her­self into the role of a woman run­ning out of cards to play. Her drunk act­ing is espe­cial­ly note­wor­thy, drink­ing every oth­er char­ac­ter under the table while still main­tain­ing a brave sense of composure. 

A coquette with a hard edge, Trish is the kind of char­ac­ter we don’t often see in mod­ern cin­e­ma. She’s nei­ther bad nor good: a tru­ly neu­tral if some­what chaot­ic pres­ence. Alwyn is much more remote, going for with­hold­ing but often com­ing off as a blank slate. Still, there’s life in his eyes, and there­in lies his charm. But ulti­mate­ly, Stars at Noon is the sto­ry of a woman who doesn’t know where she’s going, and there’s some­thing relat­able and melan­cholic about her jour­ney. Denis always excels at telling sto­ries about com­pli­cat­ed, opaque women. There’s beau­ty in the film’s brevi­ty, but it still leaves you want­i­ng more.

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

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