Sunshine. Shoreline. Sand. Sea. A paradise lost to homicide.
It’s Camus in the Ozon layer as multi award-winning writer/director François Ozon takes on THE STRANGER, a fabulously faithful adaptation of Albert Camus’ landmark novel about a detached young man and the tender indifference of the world
Algiers, Summer of1938. Meursault, a quiet and unassuming clerk in his early thirties, gets word of his mother’s death. He attends his mother’s funeral and is observed to be contained in his grief. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie, a colleague randomly encountered at the local baths.
They go to the movies, she sleeps over on the weekends, life is good.
However, Meursault has a volatile neighbour, Raymond Sintès, who draws him into an altercation involving Djemila, an Arab woman he pimps and her brothers. And then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable event occurs on a beach, one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought to question.
“Four shots and each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing” recalls Meursault in his prison cell accused of the murder of one of Djemila’s brothers.
Visually resplendent with sensuous black-and-white images care of Manu Dacosse, Ozon’s aim is high, the elegance gnomic, capturing the beauty and heat of a charged society on the boil, in a classic tale of dissociation.
Benjamin Voisin in the lead role is suitably suave yet distant, a bit of an enigma, not exactly shy but consigned to be an observer rather than an actor, until one fateful day at the beach.
Pierre Lottin stands out as Sintès with his swagger and cunning, conniving catalyst to Meursault’s act of murder.
Rebecca Marder is luminous as Marie, Meursault’s smitten girlfriend. Marie is not just a simple, smiling typist. She is aware of how dangerous Sintès is; she tries to influence Meursault, and she reproaches him. She realises
Meursault is a different sort of man, so absent from the world, but is, nevertheless, drawn to him, but knows she could just as easily hate him
for the same reasons.
Hajar Bouzaaouit plays Djemila, who is nameless in the novel, is there to bear witness to the fact that, in this story and at the trial, her brother is never mentioned, even though he is the one who was murdered. Through her character, Ozon shows how the Arab is rendered invisible, that two worlds lived side by side without seeing each other.
Production values are excellent from costumes by Chavan to production design by Katia Wyszkop Pascaline and Fatima Al Qadiri’s atmospheric score that haunts the film right up to the closing credits, which feature The Cure with their legendary track, “Killing an Arab.”
De trop? Au contraire!
