Stars at Noon Review: Sex, Lies, and Purgatory in Central America

Denis Johnson’s novel The Stars at Noon is set in 1980s Nicaragua during Sandinista rule. Claire Denis’s woozy and erratic adaptation, sans the “the” in the title, updates the era to the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic while muddying the specificity of the locale. This isn’t Nicaragua so much as “Nicaragua,” a clammy, rum-and-rain-soaked purgatory in which down-on-her-luck journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) and in-over-his-head oil company consultant Daniel (Joe Alwyn) find themselves despairingly, and hornily, trapped.

The duo’s first interaction is pure Denis: Trish spots Daniel at the opposite end of a hotel bar where they’re the only patrons. The bartender is masked and the building, guarded round the clock by armed soldiers, has been mostly repurposed as a hospital and temporary morgue for Covid patients. Save for the luscious glow on the two leads—boozy beacons of lust and life amid all the soul-sapping death—the lighting is chillingly sterile. Adding to the aura of emotional disconnect, Denis and cinematographer Eric Gautier wreak havoc with spatial geography. Trish and Daniel often appear to be sitting in completely incongruous positions between shots, though their conversation proceeds normally. Words flow despite bodies being unmoored.

Denis’s films, including White Material and Bastards, often entwine sex and politics, though there’s something particularly challenging about the mix in Stars at Noon given the opacity of Trish and Daniel’s intentions. They have a shared motive: to get out of a hostile foreign land—or, at least, one that they both perceive to be so. But beyond that and their intense physical attraction to each other, nothing else about who they are or what they want is ever clear.

Trish and Daniel’s moment-by-moment existence is ruled by the money on hand—fistfuls of crumpled córdobas that are passed around like candy and crisp U.S. dollars that are coveted like gold—and punctuated by sweaty fuck sessions. We mostly see the lead-up to or aftermath of the pair’s multiple trysts as when Daniel offers up a hilariously nonchalant “suck me” pre-coitus, or another instance in which both lovers are shown, after finger-banged orgasm, streaked with Trish’s menstrual blood. More than once in Stars at Noon, Trish or Daniel exits a hotel room, usually for a meal or a smoke, and their partner either breaks into tears or hungrily sniffs an object carrying the other’s scent, as if even temporary separation is a form of death.

Sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act, in this case, that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance. Whatever is going on in Denis’s Nicaragua (the production filmed in Panama) is mystifyingly suggested more than coherently portrayed. This ambiguity leads to images of tremendously stark power, from a dead taxi driver with a mobile phone stuffed in his mouth, to a migrant silently observing Trish and Daniel while they squat in an abandoned building. It also makes one ponder whether the film might benefit from a shade more clarity so as to fend off accusations of touristic insensitivity, of using a nation’s persistent travails as fictive backdrop to the existential dilemmas of cynical white folk screwing their pain away.

Since 1988’s Chocolat, Denis’s cinema has consistently analyzed and deconstructed the colonizer mindset. To this end, Stars at Noon is more of a mess than films like Beau Travail or 35 Shots of Rum, and not always in productive ways. Trish and Daniel are as impenetrable at the end of the film as they are at the start, two vacuously pretty figures from whom we remain at a frustrating distance—whereas in Denis’s best work, the vagueness of certain characters is beguiling, allowing us access to them as expressive vessels. Even if we never fully grasp their objectives, the dreamlike arc of their respective journeys resonates.

Stars at Noon is a much duller object, particularly in terms of tone and narrative drive. This a repetitious and at times trying 137 minutes, though the monotony is as much a feature as a bug since it helps to illuminate the torment of characters who are navigating ordeals about which they’re unsure how to feel. Though Covid is incidental to the plot, this is one of the few films that effectively captures the despondency of the pandemic at its height, and it begets one of Denis’s most indelible throwaway images when Trish stuffs a roll of toilet paper into a designer purse.

Glancing moments such as this act like shocks to the system, elevating Stars at Noon beyond auteurist curio. A trademark Denis vignette like the slow musical number here that’s shot in extreme close-up and scored with an unsurprising banger by frequent musical collaborators Tindersticks is juiced by a hard cut to an astonishingly evocative master shot of the empty dance floor. There’s also a rebel attack that Trish and Daniel find themselves in the middle of that occurs with such over-before-it-begins brutality that it makes the suspended horror of the moment hit with upsetting power. Though nothing beats the leftfield cameo from a certain frizzy-haired and wild-eyed American character actor who, as Trish’s beleaguered boss, brings unexpectedly broad, and immensely pleasurable, levity to the otherwise groggy proceedings.