Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching François Ozon’s “The Stranger” is not entirely dissimilar to that of reading the 1942 classic novel of alienation and dissociation by Albert Camus. Wisely, Ozon only rarely goes beyond the text; instead he invests signifiant creative energy into mimicking the affectless but oddly seductive tone of the novel in purely cinematic terms. So the gaps between Camus’ crisp, declarative sentences become the slivers of time lost to the cuts between coolly choreographed scenes. And the book’s bracingly straightforward descriptions of often inexplicable behaviors and thought processes, become the hard, stark edges of a sculptural black-and-white photography that is all the more mysterious for apparently having nothing to hide.
Embodying the enigma at the heart of it all is Benjamin Voisin, playing Meursault, the character who famously kills a man on a beach mere days after attending the funeral of his mother, at which he did not cry. And Voisin is superb in a role that reunites him with the director after breaking out in Ozon’s “Summer of 85,” but that requires him to play in a radically different register, all withholding, stiff-backed, self-containment. It is not easy to make the void-like absence that is the crux of Meursault’s being register on screen as a presence. But Voisin’s Meursault, for all he has some chameleonic, Ripley-like qualities — change the angle, or the parting in his hair and he can look like a wholly different person — is consistent in the unnerving steadiness of his gaze. As an aside it’s interesting to read that Ozon laments the casting of Mastroianni in Visconti’s 1967 version of Camus’ book and wishes it had been Alain Delon; Delon’s first major role, of course, was as Tom Ripley in Rene Clément’s “Purple Noon.” But Meursault is no sociopath. He never manipulates. He never lies.
The most striking non-textual indulgence Ozon allows himself comes at the very start. After the vintage Gaumont logo flashes up, we get a brief, rich contextualizing montage of archival footage of 1930s Algiers. An excitable announcer trumpets the virtues of this beautiful, fun-packed place with all the gusto of a tour guide, while upbeat gramophone music plays. But even while he’s still in that register, the mood of the images changes. A group of Arabs stare hostilely at the camera. A wall is graffiti-ed with “National Liberation Front.” Elsewhere a group of white residents hold up banners declaring their — and Algeria’s — allegiance to France. (Algerian independence would not happen for another three decades.) As the music becomes Fatima Al Qaddiri’s score with its clever commingling of modern and classical elements, these grittier images segue seamlessly into our introduction to Meursault, who is being thrown into prison. One of his fellow convicts asks him what he’s in for. Eyeing him levelly, aware that he is probably the lone white guy in the entire overcrowded dungeon, Meursault enunciates clearly: “I killed an Arab.”
Like the book, the film is divided in two, with Part One dealing with Meursault’s mother’s funeral and the torpid days of sunshine, surf and sex that follow it. With Clément Selitzki editing at an unhurried pace — which comes to feel like the episodic way Meursault experiences time, without much sense of causality between one day and the next or one event and the next — we accompany Meursault on his trip to the elder care home where his mother’s body is being prepared. He does not want to see the body. He does not speak to the other residents. And, of course, he does not cry, all throughout the vigil he maintains over her coffin the night before interment. After the service, he goes to the beach.
There, with DP Manu Dacosse’s slicingly clean and lovely monochrome photography revelling in the creamy waves, the high-sun shadows and the seawater clinging to Voisin’s skin, he meets Marie (a terrific Rebecca Marder, all luminous looks, sensuality and self-deception) and arranges to go with her to a comedy playing at the cinema later. (It’s 1938’s “Le Schpountz” aka “Heartbeat,” starring Fernandel who is namechecked by Camus). She laughs, he does not. But he does get to feel her up and later they have sex, after which Marie falls lightly in love in him, and wants to marry. Meursault acquiesces but with a casually brutal frankness as to his motives, which have nothing to do with love.
Meanwhile Meursault’s friend Sintès (Pierre Lottin), a nasty bit of work rumored to be a pimp, has been beating his Arab mistress Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and is being threatened by her brothers. And his gruff and scabbed old neighbor Salamano (Denis Lavant) has been beating his dog, but weeps and tells sentimental stories of it when it runs away (if this is not quite the role Denis Lavant was born to play, then it certainly feels like one that was just waiting until he aged into it). Violence, especially by men on the creatures they believe to be inferior to them, is in the Algerian air. Perhaps that is what rushes in to fill the vacuum where Meursault’s morality ought to be. Or perhaps, when he pulls that trigger later on that beach and, as he tells us “upsets the balance of the day” thus ushering in Part Two, which deals exclusively with his incarceration, it’s just a coin toss, an idle curiosity, a trick of the light.
The major achievement of Ozon’s film is to adapt literature without literalizing (there are just two snatches of narration that are directly lifted from source), and to honor the novel’s mystery without trying to solve it. His bolstering of the female characters, with Djemila and especially Marie given richer notes to play than the first-person narration of the book ever allowed for, is certainly welcome. And his evocation of the specific political environment of pre-war Algeria is an intelligent contemporary expansion on the novel. But in the more fundamental sense Ozon changes very little: As he has always been in the book, the Meursault of the film remains magnificently resistant to diagnosis or psychologizing. How comforting it would be to be able categorize his condition and take appropriate steps to immunize ourselves from it! How comforting and how false, and there is little comforting about Ozon’s detached, dreamily dissociated “The Stranger” except perhaps the glimpse it grants us into the abyss, from which we can pull back into the tender indifference of the world.
