‘Stars at Noon’ Review: Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn Work Up a Sweat in Claire Denis’s Seductive Central American Escapade
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticEarly in “Stars at Noon,” Yank journalist Trish gazes wistfully at a yellowed black-and-white photo of Nicaraguan resistance fighters, framed and tacked to the wall of the grim Managua hotel room where she’s having businesslike intercourse. “Young rebels used to be so sexy,” she sighs.
It’s a direct jab at the unformidable army lieutenant on top of her in that moment, but also a callback to what could be perceived from afar as a more romantic, mysterious age of global political unrest — the kind that fueled the novels of Graham Greene and films like “The Year of Living Dangerously,” an alluring realm of fiction that perhaps propeled Trish so far from home in the first place.
Claire Denis revives that sort of grimy glamor in this humid, intoxicating American-abroad thriller, but she’s not nearly so naive or nostalgic as her young protagonist.
Updating the late Denis Johnson’s 1984 novel “The Stars at Noon” to the COVID-beset present, the now article-free “Stars at Noon” shows that young rebels — and officials, and outlaws, and shady international oilmen, and drifters who don’t know exactly what they are — can still be very sexy indeed.
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