  Composite Fermi liquid metals arise at certain special filling fractions in
the quantum Hall regime and play an important role as parent states of gapped
states with quantized Hall response. They have been successfully described by
the Halperin-Lee-Read (HLR) theory of a Fermi surface of composite fermions
coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge field with a Chern-Simons term. However, the validity
of the HLR description when the microscopic system is restricted to a single
Landau has not been clear. Here for the specific case of bosons at filling $\nu
= 1$, we build on earlier work from the 1990s to formulate a low energy
description that takes the form of a {\em non-commutative} field theory. This
theory has a Fermi surface of composite fermions coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge
field with no Chern-Simons term but with the feature that all fields are
defined in a non-commutative spacetime. An approximate mapping of the long
wavelength, small amplitude gauge fluctuations yields a commutative effective
field theory which, remarkably, takes the HLR form but with microscopic
parameters correctly determined by the interaction strength. Extensions to some
other composite fermi liquids, and to other related states of matter are
discussed.
