Stars at Noon

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?

Unlikeable characters and cast.

Possibly would have been better with different lead actors?

Script seemed poor, and situations unbelievable.

But hey, you may like it? But it wasn't for me.

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.

Seems most of the reviewers missed the point of this film. Or perhaps they've seen/ read the previous material it's based on and had some expectations. I came upon this film without any knowledge of prior material or expectations.

This little film is great as an exploration of how human attraction and bonding works.... when it's put into an accelerating circumstances of life threatening situation. And as a look at sudden intimacy, even codependency, between the "last two people on earth" (well not really, but there's that feel to it) it's actually achieves a lot of depth and freshness, probably because the director is a European woman.

However I can see how some could expect something else from it. The director almost completely disregarded a coherent explanation of what's really going on in the country that puts them in danger. Like yeah the main male character is doing something shady or that's what CIA wants you to think, during tough tumultuous times in a Central American country and gets in trouble for it, but that's practically it. Perhaps she felt it's not important because that's not what she's focusing on, and perhaps if she had focused more on that the film would be more of "casserole" lol and that would not necessarily work or help... But I must agree with some reviewers that the way it's presented now in the film it kind of does give off colonial or even white European/ American colonial vibe. Like, times have changed since the 80s when the original came out (or was it the book that came out then? Not sure), and Americans and Western Europeans are not necessarily seen as the nice guys anymore, and she kind of tried to present too, but it fell flat somehow. Not sure why though... was it the fault of the source material that came out in the 80s or is it the result of Western European sense of elitism, even superiority that they still have? I can't quite put my finger on it yet.

... one reviewer asks why-the-masks, as they had been in the country in 1984 and no one had been wearing Covid-masks... it's that kind of film requires some reading before-after watching for some insights

... a well-made (even if was not in 'that' country), and well-acted film.. Margaret Qualley has the MacDowell acting chops of her mom and here in this production it's hard taking eyes off her.. she shines brilliant, even covered in sweat and mud much of the time

... not an entertaining film in the normal sense watching, you just have to go with its raw qualities, feeling like you were there evidencing the happenings... not all questions get answered.