Jon Robin Baitz

Central America as a kind of actual hell, set in an imploding Nicaragua in 1984, an American woman, marginally some sort of observer for an anti-war group, equally contemptuous of the Sandinistas and the Americans brewing trouble, it takes the form of a vast and almost Malarial vision of Latin America in free-fall. Not far from there now, Venezuela also now totters precariously and apparently the great Clair Denis is making a film of Stars at Noon – the perfect film maker for such an endeavor, having once turned Melville’s Billy Budd into Beau Travail, a movie with French Foreign Legionnaires, madness and stillness set in Djibouti. The late Denis Johnson would no doubt appreciate that she is essaying his words into pictures.