New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 2

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis) 

Fresh from directing quite possibly her worst film ever, Avec amour et acharnement (Both Sides of the Blade) (2022), Claire Denis bounces back somewhat with Stars at Noon, an adaptation of Denis Johnson's 1986 novel The Stars at Noon. Margaret Qualley stars as an American woman of no apparent past or even future. She may or may not be a journalist and while it seems as if she wants to escape a hellish, present-day Nicaragua, we have no clue where she's headed. She meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a British businessman who needs to escape more urgently than she does, and begins a feverish romance marked by extremes of passion and indifference.

The l'amour fou stuff is great, jerrybuilt for art-cinema ambiguities. But Denis tells us little about present-day Nicaragua which begs the question as to why she updated Johnson's novel in the first place. And it's not as if Denis isn't poised to examine the country's current climate. Indeed, she chose to base production in Panama because she felt it would be immoral to film in Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega's hideously repressive re-election. But beyond a few acknowledgements of COVID, her film gives no sense of life under Ortega today. And when several Nicaraguan men are gunned down while helping the principals escape on a raft, the extreme indifference with which the scene is treated makes one long for a story that centers these men rather than the two pretty stars schvitzing all over their country.

Grade: B+