Stars at Noon (2022).
For any true connoisseur of modern poésie maudit, the prospect of Claire Denis adapting Denis Johnson comes with its own ineluctable gravity. The union of these two artists—Johnson, the late visionary poet and novelist, Denis the dark romantic-turned-French art house institution—affirms their long-apparent, subterranean resonances. Both have labored at the edges of their tradition in pursuit of its particular truth; both have elevated the lives of drifters and criminals to the station of saints. In recent years, even in her mellow late style, Denis still retains a coiled viper’s intensity and, with 2018’s High Life, she settled any doubts that a genuine star vehicle—let alone one shot entirely in her second language, English—could support her sensuous, elliptical filmmaking. Johnson, despite his cult following, has only been adapted for the screen once before, to mixed results.
Denis's choice of material is characteristically heterodox. Even among Johnson’s devotees, The Stars at Noon (1986) is an obscurity, perhaps best known for the passages Kim Gordon cut up for the lyrics to one of the most menacing tracks on Daydream Nation (1988), “The Sprawl.” The novel follows the descent of an unnamed American woman into intrigue and alcoholic despair against the backdrop of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, on the eve of the critical (and still disputed) 1984 election. It marks the beginning of Johnson’s career-long fascination with expatriates caught in the gears of American imperial mischief, and specifically with the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s also the only one of his books narrated by a female protagonist. Denis counts among her most memorable films those that draw on her own autobiography living in the disintegrating Françafrique empire and, having directed two music videos for Sonic Youth, may well have heard of the book through them.
In the eighties, Johnson was on a mission not altogether different from renegade practitioners of the new American rock underground like Black Flag and the Minutemen, doing for prose what D. Boon was doing for electric guitar, carving in midair the commandments of a new society’s ragged dislocation and its wandering path to redemption. But just what about his work is cinematic can be deceptive. As a writer, his inheritance was the decline of literature’s authority, and the dominion of cinema and television over American realism. As if in unconscious response, Johnson’s finest writing can traffic in meta-images, deeply evocative but nevertheless resistant to translation:
He didn’t answer, but looked hard at me. Actually, I saw nothing of his face except for two eyes brilliant with fatigue and irritation, but I created for him one of those interrogator-faces from films and television, a cruel, deceptive face, at first bland and dreamy, suggesting interstellar distances, and turning suddenly into a cage for his inward, rabid self.
Such passages, euphoric and (like the preferred intoxicants of Johnson’s misspent youth) non-transferrable, are watermarks of a kind against mere representation. At stake, then, for Denis's Stars at Noon is the nature of its intervention into the text—what it accepts, what it supplies, and where it brings the exchange to a close. For a story with exchange, translation, and shapeshifting at its core, an authentic adaptation calls for something metamorphic, a treatment on the order of Denis's earlier imaginings of works by Herman Melville and Jean-Luc Nancy. The result, instead, is a hybrid, both pleasurable and conventional, elegant and static—a project caught (much like High Life) between the kinetic energy of its constituent elements, and the frustrating fine-tune rigor of a search for formal depths, where the rewards of a more ambitious transformation are suggested, but remain elusive.
Denis's Stars at Noon enlists Margaret Qualley as the young American, now named Trish Johnson, down and out in a contemporary Managua after a disillusioning stint as a Witness for Peace near the Honduran border. The sour informal sexual quid pro quo she’s subsisted on with a government officer has turned more so, and her press card and passport are confiscated. Later on she will learn that her gargantuan supply of cordobas—the Nicaraguan currency she has hoarded through the black market—has turned precarious as well. At the city’s only ritzy hotel, she meets Daniel, an English oil analyst played by Joe Alwyn, and a more overtly transactional night together nets her $50 US and a glimmer of hope to escape the country before a currency roll-up and her potential arrest. With the suggestion of spy games, Trish seduces Daniel away from his business meeting for a day of drunken tourism and lovemaking. At the dingy motel where she stays, each room is equipped with a separate service door, a holdover from the bygone days when it was rented by the hour.
Those days, the film suggests, are not so far behind us. Sex, in Stars at Noon, is only the most volatile threshold of exchange in a constantly shifting economy of material, language, ideology, and capital. For Trish, coercion, extraction, and desire are all folds in the same ritual negotiation in which she both trades and is traded, where identities and grand designs blur at the edges. Though from the same generation, Denis largely departs from Johnson’s post-countercultural reckoning. The novel is heavy with a tone of betrayed revolutions, both sexual and political, but the film eschews all but the faintest traces of political allegory. Instead, Denis is warmly preoccupied with Trish’s hustle, her transactional pressures a problem more of the human condition than the tragedy of any one revolution.
To this end, Qualley is an essential collaborator. The film is a showcase, both of her star power, and her appetite for risk. Cinematographer Éric Gautier manifests the country’s humidity on her skin in its various states of dress and undress, and renders the horizontal crawl of hers and Alwyn’s intertwined forms into its own stretched canvas. In Johnson’s only other adaptation to film, Jesus’ Son (1998), director Alison Maclean imports his prose in bulk through an energy-sapping voiceover. Denis's contrary intuition—that wherever possible, the adaptation ought to be tonal rather than literal—aims truer, subsuming much of the hypnotic first-person narration into an expanded performance economy of expressions, gestures, and cries. Qualley possesses a meteorological ability to change a scene’s energy with a simple adjustment of intonation or gaze. As for the screenplay’s physical demands, she wears her nudity with the innocence of Eve.
Stars at Noon (2022).
It seems that in 2022, far-flung departments of the Monroe Doctrine are still where gringos go to lose themselves, places where the rum is cleaner than the water, where sweaty wads of local money and plans for national resource development are offered with the same farcical noblesse oblige. Trish soon discovers that the farrago she had concocted to entice her new companion has hardened into something gravely real: Daniel’s intention, as it turns out, was not to negotiate his oil company’s investment in Nicaragua, but to smuggle his company’s energy research to the politically isolated Sandinistas. With his espionage detected and Trish’s contacts burning her one by one, their besotted quickie romance fashions itself into a mutual, rapidly-tightening noose. Denis has a clear admiration for the almost structural way in which Johnson’s novel conjures, as though from Trish’s rum-addled imagination, successive warped genre exercises—travelogue, romance, spy thriller. But her fidelity to the labored, Kafkaesque episodes of the book’s first half places an undue burden on Qualley, to sustain the film’s vitality through scenes of post-colonial bureaucratic torpor, let alone to unpack their minute significances.
Still, torpor in Denis's hands is not without its rewards. Her final warning to leave Managua still ringing in her ears, Trish returns to her motel room only to find that both doors—public and clandestine, journalist and prostitute, idealist and survivor—are hanging ajar. It’s a moment of wordless horror, an animal bewilderment evoked in a cinematic flourish that is, in its own right, irreducible to mere literature. To her relief, Daniel is waiting beyond the threshold. They boost a car and hit the road.
Fleeing south through jungle roads and rural villages towards the Costa Rican border, the film’s energy rises sharply, and the pace of the montage quickens. Bending the narrative further away from the source material, Denis seizes the freedom to invent: rowdy teenage tire vendors, paramilitary detachments who move past our heroes with ghostly disinterest. With reality fraying at the edges, and their bond strengthening in proportion to their abandon, the outlaw couple make the acquaintance of a gregarious American interloper, who makes a proposition to Trish for a different, more poisonous kind of work. His good manners seem to have clouded his memory for his employer’s name.
As the man from the CIA, Benny Safdie is a miracle of duplicitous, humdrum lethality—the kind of sicko one imagines at a rendition site in Guantanamo or Amman, spot-treating blood stains on his performance vest. He makes a final pronouncement on the economic function gone feral in the sphere of US influence: Central America, he says, is for gamblers. Like everything he says, it’s a heavy statement thrown lightly. The gambler—part investor, part thief—is the archetypal imperialist; but where imperialism grasps at alibis like civilization and progress (Safdie is fond of “balance”) the gambler’s faith in chance relies only on dark magic. The anthropologist Michael Taussig writes of a superstition among Colombian cane sugar workers: those who harvest cane with the help of the Devil can only spend the money they earn frivolously, lest their endeavors come to ruin. It’s difficult to conceive of a more succinct psychoanalytic model of the US mayhem in Central America than that of a diabolical gambler, wagering with one hand and sowing death with the other. Names like Iran-Contra and Dark Alliance are only nominal placeholders for something much more sordid, a casino of cash, arms, drugs, and people, with its doors open everywhere that will fly the flag. Of course, the CIA man himself is no gambler: he represents the House, and the House always wins.
The work he offers Trish is no work at all, no offer but a guarantee. Her signature on an agency report will ensure her safe passage out of the country, and 20,000 US dollars as crisp as hotel bed sheets. The contents of the report are unknown, but its subject is Daniel, and its conclusions are foregone. “Your friend is working for a rival outfit,” Safdie says, “and we intend to fuck up their action.” In 1984, the outfit in question is clear; in 2022, it’s another bit of paranoid spin. At an obvious remove from its historical origin point—Skype calls, smartphones, and COVID protocols all feature in the periphery—the political assumptions of Stars at Noon are somewhat brittle. In the novel, Johnson’s contempt for the revolution is an act of liberal self-flagellation at the rise of Reagan, sweetening the pain by making it self-inflicted. Without this subtext, and at a remove of almost 40 years, Denis's portrait of socialist decrepitude has the faint aroma of neoliberal bullshit. The film’s significantly elevated body count can feel like a sell-out to what a war correspondent in the novel calls “bang-bang.” Cuban doctors circulate the halls of Daniel’s hotel, but in the name of utopia or dystopia? If nothing else, the notion of an oil analyst with communist sympathies is too bewildering even to be funny: a crypto miner is a much surer contemporary comic premise.
Still more troubling is where Denis's evident sympathy for Trish leaves the question of her agency. If Johnson’s judgment is clear, so is the choice his anti-heroine makes. Without exposure to her internal monologue, we expect Denis to draw an indication of some kind from Qualley when she makes her decision, either to betray Daniel or not, has been made. My suspicion is that instead, in the name of ambiguity, Denis has inadvertently left us in confusion—a confusion which, crossed with the inevitability of force majeure, preserves the murky possibility of Trish’s innocence at the expense of a more dramatic interrogation of her will. When Trish finally signs, it’s something of an afterthought; in the novel, it’s the moment when (for Johnson, always a moment of profound consequence) she gives herself a name.
Today in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, the winner of that same 1984 election, is once again in power, this time looking much more the caudillo the US had proclaimed him during the days of their covert war. Denis has said that the choice to shoot in the country while Ortega still held on to power would have been “immoral.” The implication is that the decision to shoot in Panama—the scene of a successful 1989 US coup—was one of conscience, rather than of expedience (or safety). It’s murky, but I have my doubts. For better and worse, Stars at Noon values poetry over politics. Denis remains agnostic on Johnson’s cynicisms and self-recriminations, and to the perverse cover they always provide to the war criminals of the West; thus, in her film, these tendencies remain untransformed. If this risks a default to a reactionary position, so be it. After all, isn’t a US-French co-production exactly the kind of endeavor to which global capital would throw all its doors—even the doors to Nicaragua, to Venezuela, to Cuba—wide open?