Stars at Noon, the latest film from Claire Denis, befuddles and bewilders but is worth the watch if you get on its wavelength.
Margaret Qualley, her hair exploding in the Nicaraguan humidity, pulls a mask off of her face while bartering with a cashier for ice and A/C in the middle of the pandemic. Stranded in Central America during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown following some bad decisions, Qualley’s character Trish fights for resources and trades anything she can (housing, food, sex, and more) for goods and funding. Counterfeit money in her pocket, the young woman chases down leads and does anything she can to make enough (genuine, US) cash to go anywhere but there. And so begins Stars at Noon.
The latest film from award-winning filmmaker Claire Denis (her second feature this year), Stars at Noon is undoubtedly one of the wildest films of this year’s New York Film Festival. No other movie has a Skyped-in cameo from John C. Reilly, that much I can say for certain. But underneath all of the zaniness is a taut political thriller from one of our best modern filmmakers. It so happens that the zaniness is hard to overlook.
Stars at Noon follows Trish as she meets and romances Daniel, played by Joe Alwyn. A one-night stand leads to a closer relationship for our unemployed journalist protagonist, but the secrets Daniel hide inevitably lead each into greater peril. Soon, Trish and Daniel are on the run across Nicaragua as the CIA, Costa Rican police, shady business magnates, and fellow journalists get embroiled in a conspiracy.
That said, this is one of the least intelligible plots I’ve seen this year. The conspiracy is so poorly fleshed out that Thomas Pynchon would get a migraine, and the political statement made by Denis and her co-writers seems to amount to a resounding thud. But within about an hour of the 137-minute-long film, I realized that I didn’t really care. Sure there is technically a “plot” at work and a bit of a mystery to solve. But really, the story of the film is a delivery system for some excellent cinematography and a clever character study of selfishness in modern American thought.
Amidst the national crisis of COVID and with the lives of multiple people at risk, Trish is concerned exclusively with herself and her own interests. An encounter with a CIA agent (played by filmmaker and cameo-maker extraordinaire Benny Safdie) should cause some amount of drama for Trish, but Qualley plays it perfectly well as a completely out-of-it young woman. She hyper-fixates on one issue after another, often centering around the blandest, blondest, whitest man in Nicaragua. After an afternoon with the British businessman Daniel, Trish is head-over-heels in love. It’s deeply contrived, but that makes the film fun in the long run.
I’ve recently been listening to a podcast called “Unclear and Present Danger,” which discusses the political thriller genre in 90s Hollywood. Every movie is about a dimwitted American causing rampant destruction wherever they find themselves in the world. And Stars at Noon seems to be made in memory of films like that. We watch along as Trish and Daniel continue to make terrible decisions. Multiple people die, many millions of dollars in property damage occur, and Trish cares only about herself. Selfishness is the point.
In lesser hands, Stars at Noon would be an incomprehensible mess. But Claire Denis builds a marvelous and lush landscape and style for the film, while Margaret Qualley brings a perfect incompetence to her performance. The script might be a disaster, but the borderline-campiness of this film will likely find an audience of defenders in coming years. I’ll count myself among them now.
