At the beginning of “Stars at Noon,” Yankee journalist Trish looks nostalgically at a yellow-and-white black-and-white photo of Nicaraguan resistance fighters, framed and glued to the wall of Managua’s hotel room, where she is holding business relations. “Young rebels used to be so sexy,” she sighs. It is a direct blow to the incomparable lieutenant of the army on her at the time, but also a call to what could be perceived from afar as a more romantic and mysterious era of global political unrest, of the kind that fueled the novels. Graham Greene and movies like “The Year of Living Dangerously,” an appealing realm of fiction that may have pushed Trish so far from home in the first place. Claire Denis relives this kind of dirty glamor in this wet and intoxicating American thriller abroad, but she is not as naive or nostalgic as her young protagonist.
Updating the late Denis Johnson’s 1984 novel “The Stars at Noon” to the present besieged by COVID-19, the current “Stars at Noon” without articles shows that rebellious young people, officials, outlaws, gloomy international oil tankers and vagrants I don’t know exactly what they are, they can still be very sexy. No less important when played with taciturn chemistry and ten-cup teasing by such beautiful performers as Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn, albeit with salt on the skin and dirt under the nails. But the unattractive world was corrupt in 1984, and it still is now: Johnson’s prediction in the novel of a “hyper-new, totally left-wing future that reaches the rhythm of rock-n- roll “not fulfilled.
By changing the author’s tangled narrative of political hostilities, corporate espionage, and romantic salvation nearly four decades beyond its original setting, Denis and co-writers Lea Mysius and Andrew Litvack haven’t had to change much. and that the political details of the novel have changed. they retreated a little, while the romantics have advanced. It’s sexier that way, after all.
30 or 40 years ago, Johnson’s novel could have been a brilliant romantic thriller from a great studio, sold on the A-list star show and exotic places in Central America, and seen as such. ” Stars at Noon “might seem like an amazing project to veteran French sensualist Denis, whose gender-leaning projects have been even more important in tactile detail than in nail-biting decorations. But it is also not difficult to see what attracted her to Johnson’s short and energetic book, which deals with the psychology of a white stranger in a land that shakes a history of colonization and foreign dependence, a subject that Denis raised in the Colonial West Africa, has tackled films from her debut “Chocolate” to the incendiary “White Material” of 2009. The American environment and perspective may be new to her; the rest, from the dusty, dusty atmosphere of the film to its frank and bodily eroticism to another shaky, enveloping score surrounding longtime Tindersticks collaborators, is Denis vintage.
“White Material” could have been, in fact, an alternative title for “Stars at Noon”, describing how the suit worn by the elegant soft-spoken Englishman Daniel (Alwyn) for almost the entire length of the film. Unhurried film: a summer dress cut to perfection in ivory linen, the symbol of the western colonialists who scatter with great rights through lands where they do not belong. It is so flawless that you can practically hear the countdown until it is severely stained, with mud first and blood afterwards. A consultant for a British oil company in Nicaragua on business that he doesn’t mind revealing — he does pass covert industrial information between rival countries — Daniel conveys, at least at first, a serene sense of purpose as he walks through the shabby, contrasting streets of Managua. . Elegant hotel lobbies.
In fact, she is as helplessly adrift as Trish (Qualley), a transplant from Washington DC who claims to be an international journalist, even though she hasn’t had a commission for a long time. Effectively stranded in the country, locked in a fleapit motel and kissing bottles of rum a day, she survives by sleeping in business suits and local officials for hard-earned money, more precious than her black market deposit. Cordoba. When she and Daniel spend a night in a hotel bar, a simple transaction quickly becomes an inexorable attraction. Unable to separate, their respective difficult situations (she is struggling to recover the passport of the thorny Nicaraguan authorities, seemingly followed by Costa Rican police and CIA agents) merge into a shared and redoubled danger, and make a joint solution. die running across the border.
The stakes are high, the suspense warms up properly, but “Stars at Noon” doesn’t have a relentless foot on the pedal. Throughout Trish and Daniel’s passionate and ill-planned escape, Denis makes time for a stop after a pit stop with a characteristic texture and motivated by the mood: a walk through a market annoyed by flies, the conversation at one point was glimpsed through a parade of passing bad guys. umbrella, or a key confrontation at, of all places, an impromptu COVID test site. Finally, the clock stops for the most Denis-esque bloom of all: a slow, breathless dance on an empty, catchy, violet-lit floor of a nightclub, to a song of the title heavy with keys sung with a longing by Stuart Staples.
Inheriting a role given by Taron Egerton and, before him, Denis’ former muse, Robert Pattinson, Alwyn, fair and good-looking, is perhaps the ideal physical incarnation of a man described by Trish, in a of the many sharp and salty lines he gave her. the script, as “so white it’s like fucking with a cloud.” He is a deliberately emaciated and difficult-to-hold character, played in the right way and seductively secreted by the actor. But Trish is part of the plum here, and a sensational Qualley, riding a bike through a closet of thrift stores, with a halo of dark curls that can’t help but remember her mother, Andie MacDowell, grabs her with both calloused hands.
Trish considers herself a fatal worldly woman in some ways, but her immature and ugly American despair betrays her over and over again. Qualley’s ironic and dizzying performance achieves this conflict precisely, from the hard dialogue she offers with the right touch of affected genius: Trish enjoys too much of her own know-how to make it completely natural, to the cheeky walk that only slips any to a flaunting when he remembers it. In bringing this great film, Qualley joins a club conducive to Denis’ selected protagonists, including Vincent Lindon, Isabelle Huppert and the recent triple Juliette Binoche. Wherever the filmmaker goes from here, and between that, the chamber drama loaded with “Both Sides of the Blade” and the weird sci-fi experimentalism of “High Life,” who can say, rather he is expected to turn 27. -old star with her. It turns out that young rebels look pretty good.
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