\n<\/p>\n
\n\tConfounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s \u201cThe Stranger\u201d 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\u2019 crisp, declarative sentences become the slivers of time lost to the cuts between coolly choreographed scenes. And the book\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tEmbodying 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\u2019s \u201cSummer of 85,\u201d 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\u2019s being register on screen as a presence. But Voisin\u2019s Meursault, for all he has some chameleonic, Ripley-like qualities \u2014 change the angle, or the parting in his hair and he can look like a wholly different person \u2014 is consistent in the unnerving steadiness of his gaze. As an aside it\u2019s interesting to read that Ozon laments the casting of Mastroianni in Visconti\u2019s 1967 version of Camus\u2019 book and wishes it had been Alain Delon; Delon\u2019s first major role, of course, was as Tom Ripley in Rene Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s \u201cPurple Noon.\u201d But Meursault is no sociopath. He never manipulates. He never lies. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019s 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 \u201cNational Liberation Front.\u201d Elsewhere a group of white residents hold up banners declaring their \u2014 and Algeria\u2019s \u2014 allegiance to France. (Algerian independence would not happen for another three decades.) As the music becomes Fatima Al Qaddiri\u2019s 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\u2019s in for. Eyeing him levelly, aware that he is probably the lone white guy in the entire overcrowded dungeon, Meursault enunciates clearly: \u201cI killed an Arab.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLike the book, the film is divided in two, with Part One dealing with Meursault\u2019s mother\u2019s funeral and the torpid days of sunshine, surf and sex that follow it. With Cl\u00e9ment Selitzki editing at an unhurried pace \u2014 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 \u2014 we accompany Meursault on his trip to the elder care home where his mother\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThere, with DP Manu Dacosse\u2019s slicingly clean and lovely monochrome photography revelling in the creamy waves, the high-sun shadows and the seawater clinging to Voisin\u2019s 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\u2019s 1938\u2019s \u201cLe Schpountz\u201d aka \u201cHeartbeat,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tMeanwhile Meursault\u2019s friend Sint\u00e8s (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\u2019s morality ought to be. Or perhaps, when he pulls that trigger later on that beach and, as he tells us \u201cupsets the balance of the day\u201d thus ushering in Part Two, which deals exclusively with his incarceration, it\u2019s just a coin toss, an idle curiosity, a trick of the light. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe major achievement of Ozon\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s detached, dreamily dissociated \u201cThe Stranger\u201d except perhaps the glimpse it grants us into the abyss, from which we can pull back into the tender indifference of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s \u201cThe Stranger\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[11463,11462,11459,11460,11461],"class_list":{"0":"post-18736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-camus","9":"tag-enigmatic","10":"tag-francois","11":"tag-ozons","12":"tag-sharp"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}