The Stranger

Albert Camus’ 1942 existentialist novella is adapted with deadly seriousness and a distinct political charge by François Ozon, the tireless French director who’s left his characteristic playfulness tucked deep into his toy box for this one. It concerns Meursault, a man who is tried for murder in French Algeria in a personal study of colonial shame.

Ozon does leave his tongue in his cheek just long enough to open the film with an LA Confidential-style intro composed of period montage and blithe voiceover, laced with spiteful irony. But it’s soon rudely interrupted by images of revolutionary graffiti heralding a far more sombre tone that lays bare the big colonialist lie.

Harsh North African sunlight streams in monochrome from every window or vent hole, its brightness making the indoor shadows even darker, albeit not enough for the anti-hero to hide from the vicious crime he’s committed. A mostly egalitarian depth of field maintains the director’s clear-eyed view of this difficult material, so subjectivity is as rare as Meursault’s awareness of both himself and of the France he represents in microcosm.

Ozon prefers not to move the camera too much, instead imprisoning his characters in formalised tableaux as stark and unforgiving as an identity parade. Towards the end of the film, as we near the protagonist’s fate, he manifests the compositional sense of Ingmar Bergman, or even Sergio Leone.

Meursault hides from the world in the plain sight of a city in profound denial of its enforced modernism. He sips coffee alone but surrounded by strangers, and nobody seems to want to know how the French administration really runs this pocket paradise, much less how this one bad apple (from an even worse bunch) is rotting from the inside.

He witnesses, as we do, the quotidian instances of animosity and violence all around him, disinclined to get involved where we are simply unable. But we might gradually empathise with his inaction, even as we might judge him for not helping a fallen old man to his feet, or for not preventing a neighbour from beating his dog. Interactions are foisted upon Meursault, and he responds (if at all) with a guarded indifference for as long as he can get away with. Alienation seems to be his natural state, from which he observes others like an incurious scientist.

His journey through Algiers and its more pristine environs takes in both its newer European architecture and its pre-colonial edifices; a mosque converted into a Catholic church here, a rickety bus negotiating dusty roads shepherded by palm trees there. Inequalities and iniquities are relegated to mere details in the set design, subconscious reminders such as a sign in the local cinema warning of a ban on indigènes. This world may have been ‘civilised’, but it’s been done with either actual malice or at least an insouciant carelessness that can seem even more chilling.

Fatima Al Qadiri’s sparsely-heard score underlines rather than punctuates the action. Her electronic musical sighs and moans almost have the quality of a Gregorian chant, letting loose tiny parcels of pent-up frustration or wordless attempts to understand the main character’s wilfully opaque inner life. Not unlike a young Alain Delon, Benjamin Voisin delivers a magnetic yet buttoned-down performance in the lead role, straight-backed despite the weight of the world constantly encroaching on his shoulders, having wound up all tendrils of grief and guilt into a tight little spool.

Dramatising his inertia is a challenge Ozon never shirks. While Rebecca Marder’s Marie thanklessly symbolises a ray of hope for her boyfriend’s humanity, most of the people around him are as callous as he is, perhaps even more so – they just don’t mind showing it. As Sintès, the local pimp, Pierre Lottin bosses every scene he’s in by brandishing his amorality like a brass ring.

The Stranger bows its heavy head as it ponders France’s cruel imperial history, but this white-guilt trip talks us through the psychological and emotional motivations of a dying empire more than the political ones. Thus it feels less like a moralising history lesson and more like a pained cry of remorse, whose cinematic language has the steely nerve to ask the hard questions and refuse to answer them for you.

-Stew Mott-