In 1940s Algeria, a Frenchman's existential crisis in the wake of his mother's death leads him to commit murder.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: François Ozon
Starring: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud, Denis Lavant
In today's cultural context, the concept of existentialism is adorably quaint; an almost completely outmoded philosophy predicated upon sparse tenements now so trivial in their axiomatic simplicity, and an intellectual posture entirely dependent on societal privilege. Bookish le mec in the café seriously smoking while convoluting the most obvious musings on existence; life has no inherent meaning apart from that which we make for ourselves, apparently. Wow. So bourgeois! The iconic tableau of the French intellectual is faithfully (and, I'd like to think, semi-ironically) reproduced at around 10 minutes into The Stranger, our dear pal François Ozon's adaptation of Albert Camus' canonical novel, wherein Benjamin Voisin's (the pristine proxy of a Vogue model) Meursault sits at a kitchen table with a carafe of coffee as solemn cigarette smoke tousles his perfect hair while he confronts the cosmic absurdity of his mother's recent death, the camera capturing the moment in the hard pewters and soft blacks of a Robert Doisneau photograph.
In fairness, Camus did reject the "existentialist" label and the notion of lumping authors together for the sake of easy, reductive categorisation (bien joué, too. A ridiculous academic habit: imagine explaining to prophet Blake that he was the same poetic flavour as Byron...). But blame fellow intellectuel and Camus co-conspirator Barthes for the calcified legacy; when the French killed the author in 1967, they abdicated artistic vision and intent to the eddying vortex of post-structuralism. Any adaptation of The Stranger must contend with the cultural remnant of the novel, some of which is going to be generated by perceived reputation and second-hand wisdom than via immediate study (I'm sure that the nit-picking naysayers of the foolish “Wuthering Heights” had all read the book... Not even the filmmaker had appeared to - I don’t think she even listened to the Kate Bush song - instead basing her unctuous folly on some abstract notion of Brontë's masterwork). Here Ozon duly reproduces the incremental plot of the 1942 publication, with Meursault undergoing a civil numbness in the wake of his mother's passing, a swelling ennui which informs his sexual relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), his detached complicity with woman beating neighbour Raymond (your boy Pierre Lottin) and eventually leads to him to "kill an Arab" upon a beach in French Algeria.
Via the largesse of history there is space afforded for The Stranger to review colonial structures. Camus wouldn't have known about Gillo Pontecorvo but Ozon does, and duly there are cute newsreel nods at the film's opening. However, The Stranger doesn't quite capitalise on its chronological vantage point (a poignant exception is the film's final shot), preferring instead to construct a visually pleasing imitation of 1940s Algiers. The film looks gorgeous, with my favourite sequences set in "The Algerian Baths," an outdoor piscine of period outfits, changing huts and easy joy. Swimming and water become a symbol of the existential aspiration of freedom in this pulchritudinous film: when we are at the beach, or the baths, the camera is liquid in motion compared to the brusque static of interior shots or urban locations. Yet perhaps the pristine visual set is a reason why The Stranger doesn't wholly satisfy as a piece. The pictorial nature of cinema, the mechanical structure, both flattens and exposes the circumlocutory theorising and tendentious abstractions of a book about ideas (Visconti did a version which he was apparently unhappy with, too, so good company and all that). Existentialism pertains to musing, while cinema is grounded within sensation, after all: kiss kiss, bang bang.
"There's no point," a character laments, with the blithe nihilistic conceit of those dullards who won't celebrate Valentine's Day on principle or declaim "manufactured music": a limited outlook presented as intellectual weight. Another problem septuagenarian existentialism has is that language and understanding has moved on, so when Marie adoringly classifies Meursault as being "not afraid. You say what you want" to the extent that it is "hurtful," we today recognise such a man as a tedious narcissist. The film finds a second wind during Meursault's trial, wherein the Kafka-esque ridiculousness of what the defendant is truly charged with (the system, man, is more concerned with his non-compliant character than the murder committed) and Meursault's disaffected response compels (you cannot beat the narrative urgency of a trial). Ozon gingerly steps towards the genre of comedy here, but I wonder how an adaptation of the novella would fare with the tone of an all-out farce, rather than the hardened Gallic cool it seems doomed to...
A footnote. At the end of The Stranger, Ozon nobly adds a sequence where the sister of the murdered man looks upon the grave of her brother, effectively giving "the Arab" the film's last word. The gesture reminds us that the musings of L'Étranger are located within cultural entitlements enjoyed by white intellectual Europeans and possibly constitute a philosophy that we shouldn't really take for granted. However, in an embarrassing to read statement upon the confected shot, Camus' daughter and custodian remarked that she felt "Ozon did it to satisfy wokeism." Ooof. For some, the appeal of The Stranger may be that it presents an era where ideas, and discussion, and interactions were prized. And however whimsical such scholarliness may seem to modern ears, the repackaged debates and inklings of these café dwelling pioneers divertingly trumps the corrupted, imputative monotony which comprises contemporary discourse.
The Stranger is in UK/ROI cinemas from April 10th.
