In Stars at Noon, Claire Denis gives the spy thriller her unique spin. Like her sci-fi film High Life, she eschews genre staples and typical thrills to look at something deeper. Anyone who expects a Bourne or Bond flick will be disappointed, and while her approach is closer to John le Carré adaptations like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or The Constant Gardener, she has marked disinterest in the details of espionage. Her film is more primal, considering foundational issues of trust and desire, all in a sweaty setting. It is a tough sell, and as with her best films, there are rewards to those who accept the level on which she operates.
Working from a Denis Johnson novel, Denis centers her story on Trish (Margaret Qualley), a struggling journalist living in Nicaragua. The country is in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Sandinistas retain tight control, which means Trish is living in near-poverty (she is noticeably skinny, to the point other characters comment on it). To make ends meet and to find reliable sources, Qualley moonlights as a sex worker, creating arrangements with local officials in exchange for money and favors. One day she meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), an Englishman who works for a shadowy oil company. He pays to sleep with her, and soon their relationship becomes more than transactional, as evidence by their abundant physical chemistry. The government wants Daniel for reasons he keeps to himself, but that does not stop him from making Trish his accomplice.
Nicaragua is tropical and maybe exotic, but Denis and cinematographer Éric Gautier have no interest in making their film a travelogue. The interiors and exteriors are markedly drab, sort of like the feeling a tourist might get when they arrive at a vacation destination and the photos exaggerated how nice the accommodations were. The subtext is meant to disabuse the viewers and the characters that this place, a country facing the Caribbean with political upheaval, is an exciting milieu. The script, co-written by Denis, slows down the action to the immediate challenges of limited access to money or resources. When it’s humid everywhere and all her opportunities dry up, why wouldn’t Trish spend time with the attractive, mysterious man she just met?
A lot of the action and procedural details happen off-camera. We sense Trish and Daniel are in danger because their typical resources, the police and embassy, are of little use. The performances also reflect their frayed nerves. Qualley has never been better, a resourceful woman who can be impulsive at the wrong time, while Alwyn downplays his natural charisma so he is a blank slate (it is much easier to project onto him that way). There is a long, borderline languid middle section in Stars at Noon where their world diminishes until they have no choice but to think it’s them against the world. Denis strips this shift of any inertia, until her lovers make love almost out boredom. Monotony has always been in her toolkit, something that can frustrate viewers, and yet she includes enough erotic and intellectual subtext to maintain our curiosity. It is not quite clear what Trish and Daniel are thinking, even to themselves.
Cinematic limbo always leads to diminishing marginal returns on a long enough timeline, and so Stars at Noon must develop a plot. Left with no recourse, Trish and Daniel try their luck by attempting to cross the border into Costa Rica. Along the way, they meet a sleazy CIA Agent (Benny Safdie) who throws a wrench in their plans. He manipulates Trish handily, and so the final scenes to Stars at Noon do not unfold with suspense, exactly, but with a keen understanding of human nature. What does trust matter when you’re a fugitive? What do these people really owe each other? Words like “love” are thrown around, and it’s a credit to the film/performers that we cannot fully parse their use, nor can they.
When there is a resolution to the quasi-romance, it lands with a directness and cynicism that’s been there the entire time. By surrounding her film with flimsy staples and systematically showing us how they do not really matter, Denis bracingly returns to her true subject: the myriad ways we constantly fail ourselves.
Photo courtesy of A24
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