Early on in Stars at Noon, Margaret Qualley leaves a hotel and traipses back to her own shabbier quarters, shoes slung over her shoulder with a sublime insouciance. It's the height of a long, treacherous summer, and even the night is stinking hot; the cloudless skies above provide little relief from the bitumen underfoot.
We're in Managua, Nicaragua, and the streets are pockmarked with glassy puddles from an earlier downpour. Qualley's soles, inevitably, end up soiled. And yet she walks – and walks, and walks, until day breaks and she slumps into bed, unwashed.
There is an unhurried physicality that underscores much of Stars at Noon – the fever dream that made Claire Denis a co-winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, and the French auteur's second release in Australian theatres this year after the turgid love triangle of Both Sides of the Blade.
"Turgid" is also how one might describe this film, though the tedium is the point of it all, especially as the sun beats relentlessly overhead and hydration is a lottery, not a guarantee.
A feculent odour permeates every frame like humidity, Denis's camera lingering on sweat and sebum with a perverse fascination. Grimy feet feature more than once; elsewhere, people barter showers and air-conditioning like luxury commodities to ward off the stench.
Qualley (Maid; My Salinger Year) is Trish, the film's hard-boiled heroine, whose hilariously Western name only exacerbates her estrangement from the Nicaraguan milieu around her.
She's been in the Central American country anytime from a few months to a few years; she might have been a reporter in a past life, though a brief, surprising cameo from John C. Reilly as an exasperated editor makes clear that the commissions have long dried up – not least because the last piece she penned drew the ire of government officials.
With journalism looking dire, she's turned to sex work – that other gig economy – which she performs in exchange for either dollars or favours from local politicians and their foot soldiers.
Even so, her own position in Nicaragua is fast becoming untenable: She's been stripped of the media pass that allows her access in a country whose own civilians exist as an underclass to expats, and she can't seem to scrounge together the money for a one-way ticket out of here.
In the midst of this predicament, she encounters a handsome stranger who might just prove to be her golden goose: Daniel (an uncommonly scruffy Joe Alwyn), some kind of oil executive who's embroiled in a situation of his own. There are whispers of corruption, backdoor dealings, election-fixing – though these are all secondary to the primordial pull between the two foreigners.
What starts as a one-night tryst and an exchange of cash soon becomes a torrid affair. Theirs is a courtship of long, languorous gazes, each contemplating the other almost noiselessly, as if speech might puncture their perfect fantasy.
When they do talk, it's in stilted declarations: Call it the quirks of a French director working outside her native language, but even the most awkward of lines are charming in their artlessness. (Never has the phrase "Suck me!" been deployed with such magnetism.)
All the while, their gauzy romance obscures the current of political tension eddying beneath the surface.
Denis's film is based on the 1986 novel by American author Denis Johnson, which is set in 1984 and situates itself within the violence of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
The bloodshed, for the most part, is erased from Denis's adaptation, leaving only the faintest whiff of death – glimpses of body bags and armed militia, as well a double-crossing cop from the neighbouring Costa Rica (Danny Ramirez), who tails the lovebirds with increasing menace.
And though Denis transposes Stars at Noon to the present day, like much of her work it feels atemporal – more like a memory than any coherent period. Indeed, the film's surroundings could easily pass for the 80s were it not for the appearance of face masks and PCR tests, each COVID signifier playing like a jump scare – a contemporary analogue for the paranoia of Johnson's novel.
That paranoia might be the one constant in a film which otherwise feels as free-associative as its noodling Tindersticks score.
Its lovers are completely unbound from anything as prosaic as morals or motivation. Instead, they're governed by pure id, spiralling further and further into each other's vortices even as their time in Nicaragua rapidly expires – leaving them effectively stateless.
This image of white expats marooned overseas has long been a fascination of Denis's – a product, perhaps, of her own upbringing in Africa's French colonies. Versions of Trish and Daniel exist across the director's oeuvre: in Beau Travail's hardened soldiers in the Djibouti desert, or Chocolat's colonial allegory through the eyes of a French child in Cameroon.
There's a wry irony to the purgatory all of these characters find themselves in, reckoning with the results of their own intrusion into foreign lands. Daniel is so white that sleeping with him is "like fucking a cloud," Trish quips; when they're eventually forced to flee from authorities, lurching deeper into the Nicaraguan jungle, they stick out as stark aberrations amongst inky thickets.
Another of Denis's fixations also colours their disastrous dalliance: flesh.
Denis is arguably cinema's greatest painter of intimacy, for whom sex needs not telegraph profundity or depravity, as it might in the work of a more prudish director.
Instead, sex is an expression of base instinct: Think of Trouble Every Day, her 2001 erotic horror where lust unleashes an uncontrollable, cannibalistic rage, and the recent High Life, where death-row passengers aboard a spacecraft use a horrifying metallic chamber for self-gratification – an experience equal parts painful and pleasurable.
Stars at Noon sees her make easy work of Qualley and Alwyn, returning, throughout, to shots of supple body on supple body, illuminated so sparsely they seem to melt into one. Sex, here, is obsession: the mutual delusion of a holiday fling without past or future, doomed to exist merely in this present moment.
One spectral shot – in a film full of them – shows Trish and Daniel slow-dancing under a plummy glow, arms draped over one another. Suddenly, a cut: to reveal an entirely vacant dance floor – a liminal space, if you will – where the couple eke out a few more moments of solitude before the outside world comes creeping back in.
It feels like the sort of thing that the other great cataloguer of obsession, Taylor Swift, might have sung about on Midnights: an album, in fact, indebted to Denis.
(For the celebrity sleuths in the room: Swift and her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff started working on the record as their real-life lovers, Alwyn and Qualley, went off shooting. "Midnights … flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together," she wrote on Instagram.")
Like a Taylor Swift lyric, Stars at Noon can be frustratingly cryptic, a snarl of knots that tightens the more you pick at it.
Submit to its alien rhythms, however, and you'll find a strange allure in all of its tropical malaise. It might be the year's most dazzling love story – or maybe that's the fever talking.
Stars at Noon is in cinemas now.
