Stars at Noon réal par Claire Denis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stars at Noon réal par Claire Denis Lucas Hollister Denis, Claire, réal. Stars at Noon. Int. Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Benny Safdie. Ad Vitam Production, 2022. Some two hours into Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, one encounters a scene so flagrantly amateurish and unrealistic that it calls into question either Denis’ competence as a filmmaker or, less improbably, the underlying premise of the film. In this scene, lovers on the run Trish (Margaret Qualley) and Daniel (Joe Alwyn) are crossing illegally by raft into Costa Rica. As they arrive at shore, they are accosted by gunmen intent on robbing them. The trembling camera sits on the shore behind the assailants, giving us their viewpoint as they gun down the Nicaraguans on the raft, yet allow Trish and Daniel to run past their assault rifles and escape unharmed. This set-piece, which is followed by a close shot of a dead victim in the water, suggests the extent to which Stars is a film about collateral human damage and the relationship between what we might call white plots—in this case both the love story and the political plot centered on US interference in Nicaraguan politics—and nonwhite settings. The casting of Benny Safdie as the CIA-agent villain and the fact that Robert Pattinson was initially slated to play Daniel, point to the influence of the Safdie brothers’ anti-thriller Good Time, in which Pattinson’s criminal behavior inflicts considerable harm on secondary black characters. (Denis attended the premiere of Good Time at the Cannes Film festival in 2017). Trish’s COVID-patterned dress positions her as a kind of viral agent, while the way Denis plays with who is wearing masks, where and for what reasons, recalls Denis’ longstanding Fanonian interest in the politics of exposure and racialized violence, of mask and skin. In many ways, Stars at Noon echoes White Material, wherein a privileged white subject is caught in conditions of political violence for which she is synecdochally responsible. However, in direct distinction to Isabelle Huppert’s stubbornly brave Maria, Margaret Qualley’s Trish prostitutes herself to survive, drinks, and dis solves into tears whenever she is alone. Stylistically, Stars eschews the stunning long shots of Chocolat or White Material in favor of jittery handheld shots or static compositions of seedy interiors and rundown streets. While Huppert’s Maria identifies with the land to the point of confusing herself with it, Trish wants nothing more than to flee a country she disdains; and while White Material had the grandeur and weight of a classical tragedy, Stars follows two bad people on their squalid anti-adventure. Stars is, no doubt, less aesthetically pleasing and likeable than some of Denis’ other films about the relationship between race, desire, and (geo)politics. However, the implausible survival of the central couple as they traverse a collapsing country in a drunken stupor, the pleasure they take in each other’s beautiful bodies, and the disturbing final scene—in which the power roles are reversed and Trish’s subjection is transformed into positive “experience”—combine to suggest the critical perspective of the film. What matters, for Trish and for the conventional political thriller, isn’t so much what happens as that the story remain, whatever happens, all about you. [End Page 188] Lucas Hollister Dartmouth College (NH) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French