Early on in Stars at Noon, Margaret Qualley leaves a hotel and traipses back to her own shabbier quarters, shoes slung over her shoulder with a sublime insouciance. It's the height of a long, treacherous summer, and even the night is stinking hot; the cloudless skies above provide little relief from the bitumen underfoot.
We're in Managua, Nicaragua, and the streets are pockmarked with glassy puddles from an earlier downpour. Qualley's soles, inevitably, end up soiled. And yet she walks – and walks, and walks, until day breaks and she slumps into bed, unwashed.
There is an unhurried physicality that underscores much of Stars at Noon – the fever dream that made Claire Denis a co-winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, and the French auteur's second release in Australian theatres this year after the turgid love triangle of Both Sides of the Blade.
