Few filmmakers can evoke, as fully as Claire Denis does, the intoxication and menace of feeling cast adrift in a world where you don’t belong. Think of the French coffee-plantation owner in “White Material,” clinging desperately to the war-torn African country she’s claimed as her own, even as it tries to expel her like a deadly virus. Or think of the solitary man of mystery wandering the globe and trying to stave off his own mortality in “The Intruder,” a title that could easily sum up this filmmaker’s own adventurous, boundary-defying spirit.
I flashed on both those movies in between all the hot sex, cool liquor and lukewarm longueurs of “Stars at Noon,” Denis’ 15th feature and a co-winner of the Grand Prix at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Adapted from “The Stars at Noon,” Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel of almost the same title, it’s nominally a political thriller, marbled with sweaty erotic interludes, a few listless chase sequences and a quasi-Beckettian streak of existential aimlessness. It isn’t one of her better movies, but like even her lesser achievements, it warrants more than easy dismissals. It’s a fascinating confluence of talent and tedium; it’s also a story in which tedium — the day-after-day frustration of a stalled, thwarted existence — may well be the point.
That story centers on a young American journalist named Trish (Margaret Qualley, an impudent firecracker), who’s sweating it out in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. Once she must have arrived here on a tide of youthful muckraking idealism, eager to see and maybe change the world. Now she drifts between random bars and random beds, subsisting on a rum-based diet and having sex with any man for a fistful of cordobas. Trish just wants a Coke, a shampoo and a plane ticket home, all eminently reasonable if not-so-easily realizable goals. She hasn’t written a piece in ages, having burned one editor too many (John C. Reilly has a hilarious Zoom cameo as one of them). She’s also had her passport confiscated by the Nicaraguan government, which doesn’t care for her coverage of local unrest.
