Are the Characters in Stars at Noon Unbearable or Just Unbearably Hot?

Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn are expats unable to keep their hands off of each other in the unsettling new movie from Claire Denis. Photo: A24

Margaret Qualley’s character in Stars at Noon has to smell absolutely terrible. Her name is Trish, and she’s a journalist — or at least tried to be one for a while. When Claire Denis’s film — the great French filmmaker’s second to hit U.S. theaters this year — begins, Trish has shifted her focus to another form of freelancing: resentfully engaging in sex work in exchange for cash and the ability to hold on to the press pass providing her a nominal shield in a tumultuous Nicaragua. Trish jokes about how badly she needs to buy shampoo, but after hours drifting around Managua in the sticky heat and into the beds of two different men, she crawls into her own in a bare-bones hotel without bothering to shower or change — as if there were no point in washing off the sweat, fluids, and rum when she was just going to do it all again in a few hours. She takes a perverse satisfaction in her own degradation, as though by drinking her meals, going pointedly unwashed, and offering herself up for $50, she’s going to somehow make everyone involved in putting her in her increasingly desperate situation sorry.

The joke’s on her, though — everyone around Trish has more pressing concerns than the well-being of an alternately cynical and childish American girl who has gotten herself stuck in another country, and anyway, the squalor tourism only seems to be making her more beautiful. “Perverse” is a good overall description for Stars at Noon, a hypnotic but relentlessly disconcerting movie and never more so than in the way that Denis frames Qualley like an influencer on a sponsored trip — the humidity making her skin glow and her mane of curls wilder, the drooping sundress showcasing the doelike length of her limbs as she shucks off her battered huaraches and saunters barefoot through the streets at dawn. Trish may be without her passport and short on the funds to buy a plane ticket out of the country, but her foreignness, however shopworn, seems to light her from within. When she meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), an enigmatic British businessman with a flop of blond hair and the rakish beginnings of a beard, the two fall into each other’s arms like a pair of exotic animals who’ve been matched up together at a zoo — their mating preordained.

Stars at Noon is a film about half-aware white people fucking themselves silly while trying to get out of Central America, and it never quite settles on whether this is unbearable or just unbearably hot. Denis has long held an interest in colonialism and the violent reverberations of occupation, and Stars at Noon is, like Chocolat and White Material, about the liminal space occupied (and the unsteady power wielded) by white expats. But it’s also about the headiness of being an outsider basking in borrowed oppression while never expecting to be subjected to it oneself — an ugly privilege it’s bewildering to see so helplessly romanticized, as though it were impossible to resist. While adapted from a 1986 novel by Denis Johnson that was set during the Nicaraguan Revolution, the film takes place in the present day and doesn’t update the political situation so much as push it out of focus and into the background. Like White Material, which is set in an unspecified African nation, Stars at Noon essentially genericizes its turmoil in order to stress that it’s the result of a continuing pattern of western interference — an erasure done in the name of a progressive perspective.

That’s a choice that feels queasier in this context — in a film that is so unmoored from any ethical grounding that Trish’s and Daniel’s motivations are opaque to the point that, when Daniel finds himself getting tracked by a Costa Rican cop (Danny Ramirez) and jovial CIA agent (a cheerily sinister Benny Safdie), it’s unclear what he did or why Trish decides to stick by him. (Not that either comes across as especially savvy in the first place.) This vertiginous quality is by design, corresponding to the sense that Daniel and Trish are spinning out into space; whatever lives they left behind are incidental.

Alwyn, introduced as a sentient pair of weepy blue eyes in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, has yet to be cast in a role he fully occupies, though he comes close here as a man who embodies dissociation, whom Trish calls so white, “It’s like being fucked by a cloud.” He and Qualley don’t have much by way of chemistry, but that doesn’t matter — the characters’ circumstances, rather than any pheromonal pull, are at the heart of their delirious connection.

They make life hell for just about everyone they encounter as they flee for the border, and yet, as they doze in a tangle of limbs in a motel room while rain rattles against the rooftop, or share a desperate clinch on an empty dance floor in lush mood lighting, it’s easy to be seduced. All that’s missing is the scene in which one or both of them wake up, jet-lagged, to their plane landing them back on their home turf — all of those other people’s problems dissolving like a dream.