FRANÇOIS OZON has contributed reinterpretations of various genres. By The Grace Of God (Arts, 1 November 2019) delved sensitively into French Roman Catholic Church child-abuse cover-ups. Everything Went Fine (Arts, 24 June 2022) investigated the heartaches and ethics of assisted dying. The Stranger (Cert. 15) ponders life’s meaning with an adaptation of Albert Camus’s seminal novel L’Étranger.
Algeria, 1938, but a story for all times, long after French colonisation. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) seems impervious to those surrounding him. Marie (Rebecca Marder) loves him because he is different. He, on the other hand, doesn’t know what love is. When witnessing Salamano (Denis Lavant), a neighbour, thrashing his dog, Meursault considers that it is not his business. He colludes with the crooked Sintès (Pierre Lottin), who beats his Arab mistress, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit). And, crucially Meursault remains utterly impassive at his mother’s funeral.
The book’s English-language title is The Outsider, which gets nearer to describing the hero’s mindset. This narrative device makes Meursault, as spectator, see more of the game than the players. When he blindly shoots Djemila’s brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani), he thinks that it was because of the unrelenting sun, an observation that others are all but invisible to us. Camus doesn’t even give Arabs their names in L’Étranger.
Unlike the 2001 Turkish adaptation Yazgi (Fate) and Visconti’s 1967 Lo Straniero, this first French-language adaptation is in black-and-white. Ozon chose to give the movie an almost metaphysical dimension of Algeria as a lost paradise. The middle section covers the murder trial, during which Meursault’s lack of feelings hitherto weighs heavily against him. Camus remarked that his hero is condemned because such behaviour is foreign to society. He also prefaced the American edition with the comment that Meursault was “the only kind of Christ we deserve”: one who silently stands outside all humanly created understandings of normality.
Voisin plays this with sufficient detachment for us to question who is judging whom here. But even his figure of solitude cannot sustain this stance. Interestingly, it is only when face to face with Swann Arlaud’s sympathetic prison chaplain that Meursault displays any passionate emotions. He angrily rejects the priest’s suggestion that even the most miserable among us have seen in their darkness a divine face. “Life is absurd. Why should I care?”
Despite his protestations, we have already noted signs of this in his love for life. We then hear a disembodied voice quote Camus’s famous line about Meursault opening himself to “la tendre indifférence du monde”, translated here as the tender indifference of the world. Ozon, however, has shown us a universe far from indifferent, through the very presence of creatures who display compassion, justice, and a desire to help, as well as shame and savagery.
Ozon acknowledges his debt to the religious cinema of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. Meursault mimics that film’s meeting of lovers through prison bars: an echo, perchance, of the strange path that he has had to take to reach out to another. Ozon then adds a final scene. By inserting an ethereal gesture, he makes a telling comment on Camus’s absurdism.
Released on 10 April.