Quiet American – Weekend – Kommersant
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A new film by Frenchwoman Claire Denis, Stars at Noon, is being released in Russia. It is a story about how unbearable it becomes to live under a dictatorship when it rains.
Nicaragua, pandemic, dictatorship, elections coming soon. Perhaps there will be no elections or they will be rigged – it does not matter: the American journalist Trish hopes to be far from here by this time. Now she lives in some hole, drinks rum, sleeps with those who can pay in dollars or provide her with some kind of service; if you’re lucky – with those who have air conditioning in the hotel. It is very hot in here. And tropical showers. And people with machine guns, which almost no one pays attention to. And protest posters “No usurpation of power.” Trish meets Daniel, a British businessman, and it looks like now she can do him a favor and warn him against dangerous connections. Maybe together they can get out of this hell.
She answers his question in exactly the same way that brought her here: “I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell.” She is sarcastic, angry, reckless, desperate, never says what she thinks, wrote a “stupid article about abductions and executions” and is now clearing up the consequences. She smiles at big officials, waves at small ones, looks for money for a ticket, tries to return her confiscated passport, explains in a threatening tone to everyone who does not want to listen that she is a journalist and will leave here in two days – but a call to an American editor proves that she is lying and here.
The British businessman – handsome, with his head in the clouds – also obviously does not tell the whole truth. Yes, in fact, you can’t wait for it from anyone here, and you can’t even read anything from their faces: a pandemic, everyone is wearing masks, you can’t see their faces, it’s impossible to understand who is thinking about what.
These two, Trish and Daniel, simply have no one else to rely on. Everyone lies, but some are nice to sleep with, and others not so much. So they will try to be together until the CIA separates them.
“Stars at Noon”, although it won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, disappointed critics: too much erotica, too little chemistry between the main characters. But the Frenchwoman Claire Denis cannot be reproached for her inability to explore “chemistry”, to fix the connections that arise between people. Starting with the semi-autobiographical “Chocolate”, she explores the same thing: how strangers turn into their own, how one becomes a stranger. Whether it’s bloody love in the sci-fi drama Trouble Every Day or the military adrenaline of Good Job, Claire Denis explores human feelings by touch and never ceases to be amazed by them.
In Stars at Noon, these feelings are melancholy, habitual hopelessness, impenetrable rain. In the meaningless escape of the characters from themselves, there are echoes of the broken world of Paul Bowles, Antonioni’s Professions: Reporter (“We are all the press,” says the Englishman), there is the indifference of strange and alien spaces. The soundtrack of Dany’s frequent partners, the band Tindersticks, adds melancholy and chemistry to the characters’ relationship with these spaces. There really is no chemistry between Trish and Daniel themselves – primarily because she needs not chemistry, but air conditioning.
Where is love? They do not have love, but a joint activity. They both want to stay alive. And one more thing – a little bit of justice, and one more thing – so that everything is good, so that the country develops, and they also want each other, and also – not to be left alone, and yet – so that it does not get so hot.
Gradually, Daniel is the only one she can hold on to, despite the fact that it becomes more and more dangerous to exist next to him. You feel this danger with your skin, this is not the primitive danger of standard spy thrillers, when disturbing music sounds, someone is killed, someone is being chased. Skin is what Claire Denis knows how to show best. And what’s under the skin.
“Stars at Noon” is a kind of antonym for “White Material”, Denis’s existential thriller with Isabelle Huppert, in which the heroine, in the midst of anarchist African chaos, was waiting for the coffee plantation to be harvested, blindly trying to live as if nothing was happening, although she herself space squeezed her out. In Stars, the heroine tries to run away, although the wild space sucks her in, wraps around her, does not let go.
Denis reimagined Melville (“Good job”), Roland Barthes (“Let the sun in”); Stars is the film adaptation of the debut novel by American writer and poet Denis Johnson, who died in 2017. He wrote it in Managua during the civil war, when he dreamed of becoming a journalist, but none of his material was wanted to be published. Trish is his self-portrait. Denis, who has long discussed a possible film adaptation with the writer, says that in him, and in his poems and novels, there was always some kind of melancholy, “as if he was not sure that he understood everything correctly,” and that was what attracted Denis, felt like a soul mate.
Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) is an actress of rare range, she outdoes even a tropical downpour. Claire Denis always said that for her the most important thing is the actors, she must love them and trust them, the rest is a matter of technique. It is driven by instinct, not the logic of the character. Several episodes in which Trish succumbs to despair, according to Denis, are impossible to direct, “things like this can only be done by an actress.”
The rest pale against the background of Kuelli – and a restrained smiling Joe Alvin, a cloud in white pants in the middle of a strange world, and a shiny cereushnik (Benny Safdie), and even John C. Reilly in a cameo. But it should be so, here the main one is Trish, all the rest are just failed heroes of her failed texts.
After filming With Love and Fury, Denis said that it was impossible, even being in love, to cut yourself off from what is happening in the world; in the “Stars” the alignment of forces is changing. It is impossible to cut yourself off from what is happening somewhere in the world, but imagine that everything is happening not somewhere far away, but personally with you. You meet people with guns more often than people without guns, you have to steal toilet paper and shampoo in an expensive hotel, you have to sleep with those who have power, everything is drowned in heat or tropical rain, and your passport is with the police, and you most likely they won’t give it back. And now you need something completely harmless to get out of all this. Some signature. Any word.
The only thing that seems crude in this film – although this is obviously the problem of the novel – is the alignment of forces that turns meditation into morality: there is a dictatorship, there is a press, there is Britain, there are States with Costa Rican assistants. These are bad, those seem to be better, these are good, but those over there will win anyway. The press will survive, but it will remain corrupt. He will drink a lot. Buy a plane ticket. It won’t fly away.
I would like to call “Stars at Noon” an erotic spy thriller, but it’s still a tactile movie, a movie of low frequencies and an impending choice. A drama about how scary it is to love someone – a stranger, a job, freedom. How dangerous. How hopeless.
In theaters April 13
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