Stars at Noon movie review & film summary (2022)

The tactility of the rain in the "chase" scene (it looks to have been spontaneous and real, a thing that happened) is very Denis. She's got her own specific worldview and interests—this film, like a lot of her work, is shaped by her experience growing up in colonial Africa and being aware from an early age of what happens when Western governments and corporations insert themselves into the politics of nonwhite countries. But she's also part of a group of filmmakers (along with such iconic directors as Wong Kar-wai and Michael Mann) who could be described as "sensualists," because they would rather take a moment to burnish details of the worlds they create or find ways to visually and sonically mirror the characters' emotions than rush from one plot point to the next.

Accordingly, this is not the nail-biting saga of a crusading reporter getting swept up in a conspiracy, or risking death on a battlefield in hopes of winning a Pulitzer, nor is it a hothouse "love in a chaotic place" film with overtones of a thriller or spy picture, like "The Constant Gardener," "Under Fire," "The Quiet American," or "The Year of Living Dangerously." Denis didn't have the budget for that sort of thing anyway, much less to set the story in the '80s. So she set it in the present, updated the political and atmospheric details, and let the Covid-19 precautions that her crew experienced on location become part of the texture. 

The result is a contemporary character study of a young American woman hustling in a foreign land. Trish is smart, cynical, and tenacious, in the manner of a grifter dame in an old Hollywood drama. When Daniel tells her she's drunk, she says, "Would I be sitting her with you if I were even the littlest bit sober?," a line that could have been snapped off by the young Bette Davis. But she is also broken and drifting towards oblivion. And so  is he. 

This is a film about immature, brittle-souled, eloquent people who drink and have sex and move through real places and occasionally stop to savor them. It clocks in at two hours and seventeen minutes, and the pace is such that you could imagine an impatient viewer complaining, "Why do we need three minutes of the couple being flirty in a hotel room?" or "Why do we watch Trish walk slowly down a street, and why doesn't the director cut when she leaves the frame, instead of hanging onto the shot a bit longer to watch the stray cat crossing in the background?" That stray cat might be the key to appreciating what makes Denis special. Most of the characters in this film are stray cats, and she likes watching them do their thing.

Now playing in theaters and on demand and available on Hulu on October 28th. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46sq5qqo2KutXnNqKanZZ2kw6qxjKucr6GVrHpzfJFr