A heatstricken reverie of violence and mystery unfolds in this film, a numb ecstasy of the inexplicable, as experienced by a sensitive white European under the unbearable noonday sun. Set in 1940s French Algeria (and filmed in Morocco), François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.
An archive reel introduces us briskly to Algiers and its casbah, with a hint of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko; then we are shown our antihero Meursault, remanded there on trial for the capital crime of murder, played with many an unreadable moue of listless unconcern by Benjamin Voisin. Flashbacks show us his dull office job in Algiers, where he turns down a promotion and transfer to Paris, one of his many shrugging gestures of indifference to his own interests.
