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Prolific and unpredictable, François Ozon is one of modern French cinema's most important directors. Releasing a new film almost every year for the past quarter of a century, Ozon has skipped between genres, from sultry erotic thrillers and surrealist satires to jukebox comedies and black-and-white period dramas. With The Stranger, he turns his hand to the existential and the absurd, adapting and subtly updating Albert Camus’ famous novella of the same name.
In the 1940s, in French colonial Algeria, a young, emotionally detached Frenchman called Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) receives news of his mother’s death via telegram. Under a sweltering Algerian sun, he visits the retirement home where she spent her final years and holds a vigil there before her funeral, expressing not a flicker of sadness or emotion at her passing. He visits the local swimming baths the next day, where he meets an old acquaintance, Marie (Rebecca Marder), with whom he begins a relationship. On a trip to the beach with Marie and his thuggish friend, Sintès (Pierre Lottin), however, Meursault senselessly kills an Algerian man, ‘because of the sun’.
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The film is shot in stunning black and white by Belgian cinematographer Manu Dacosse. The white colonial buildings of Algiers are almost blinding in the oppressive heat thanks to Dacosse’s hard, high-contrast lighting, and details such as the palm trees, sailors and sounds of traffic and people below Meursault’s apartment create a highly authentic period atmosphere. There is a volatility in the heat: the tension between the colonial French and the native Algerians hangs in the air.
In the sweltering courtroom where Meursault’s subsequent trial takes place, its benches filled with Europeans in thick suits fanning themselves with their newspapers, Ozon illustrates Camus’ assertion that life is meaningless and therefore absurd. Meursault, never one to lie or speak unless he has something to say, doesn’t deny killing ‘the Arab’. His crime, indeed, is never even the focus of the trial. It’s described as ‘bad luck’, just something that happens. Instead, the prosecution’s horror is directed at the fact that Meursault didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral and was happy to return to his daily routine unaffected.
The film falters slightly when the previously detached Meursault then explodes into an impassioned rage at a chaplain (Anatomy of a Fall’s Swann Arlaud) and the film becomes an exhaustingly dense philosophical debate. Ozon lifts a lot of dialogue from the novella throughout the film, but it's particularly noticeable in these final scenes.
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Ozon nevertheless deserves credit for successfully adapting this complex work. Few have tried, the most notable past adaptation being a dry and uninteresting affair directed by Luchino Visconti in 1967. He cast Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, who was perhaps too charming an actor for the role, whereas Voisin seems to lift the cold apathy of the character right off the page. His icy beauty is almost reminiscent of Alain Delon, coincidentally the original choice for the role in Visconti’s version.
Ozon’s film develops the female characters’ roles and offers a fresh post-colonial perspective on the novella. More attention is paid to the victim’s sister, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), and crucially the novella’s unnamed ‘Arab’ is given a name – Moussa Hamdani – in the final scene.
Ozon therefore amplifies the connection between the colonial setting and Meursault’s acceptance of the absurd. This perhaps reflects modern audiences’ interest in the native Algerian perspective rather than just that of the colonial settlers as seen in the novella – it’s an appropriate choice and results in a fresh, more politically aware re-telling. I might've picked a different song than The Cure's ‘Killing an Arab’ for the end credits, though.
The Stranger is released on 10 April
