The film by Claire Denis wants to be the statement to the seismographer of a meeting, but too often resembles the tribulations of a couple of top models in full sentimental disrepress.
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The electricity of desire combined with the experience of loss, the emotional wanderings or the upheavals of love passion are all grooves dug by the cinema of Claire Denis. A cinema that we readily said “connected to the bodies”, attentive to their contacts and transfers of energy, often inclined to uproot them, to project them into a distant horizon (djibouti in Beau Travail, in 1999, Polynesia in The intruder, in 2004, the intersideral space in High Life, in 2018). Stars at noon, his last feature film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, renewed, according to the novel of the same name of Denis Johnson (1949-2017), published in 1986, most of these reasons, but of a strangely devitalized way.
In Nicaragua, two expatriates drifting, an undocumented American journalist (Margaret Qualley), blocked on the spot, and a Briton in search of investments (Joe Alwyn), are shaken out of interest, stretch out for convenience, convenient, convenient And, out of passion, will not leave each other. She seeks to win the Costa Rica, he discovers herself spun by a police officer under cover, and both embarked on a strange rider, drunk and out of phase, against a backdrop of the wrestling of private interests (Benny Safdie as a curious American “consultant”) For the appropriation of petroleum resources.
Disproportion of scale
In the line of High Life, with Robert Pattinson, Claire Denis continues, in “Des Stars at noon”, a work with an international dimension, in English in the text. The film aims to be the statement to the seismographer of a meeting, but too often resembles the tribulations of a couple of top models in full sentimental disrepress, in a country on the edge of the civil war. That it can serve as a decor in the existential spleen of Westerners in exile rests on a disproportion of somewhat disturbing scale.
The Impressionist style of Claire Denis only succeeds in drowning the fish: the whole background of geopolitical intrigue, at times touched, mixing industrial espionage and American interference, is condemned to remain in indeterminacy. Barely three months after the presentation of love and relentlessness at the Berlinale, from the stars at noon is the second unprecedented work that the director discloses in a large international festival.