Confundant, disturbing and yet icy, the experience of looking at François Ozon’s “The Stranger” is not entirely different from that of reading the classic novel of 1942 of alienation and dissociation by Albert Camus. Wisely, Ozon rarely goes beyond the text; Instead, he invests a significant creative energy to imitate the tone without effect but strangely attractive of the novel in purely cinematographic terms. Thus, the gaps between the crisp and declarative phrases of Camus become the sparkles lost in the cuts between coldly choreographed scenes. And the delicately simple descriptions of the book of behaviors and often inexplicable thought processes become the hard and austere edges of a black and white sculptural photography which is all the more mysterious to have apparently nothing to hide.
Benjamin Voisin, playing in Meursault, the character who kills a man on a beach, played the Meursaurs, the character who kills a man on a beach. And neighbor is superb in a role that brought him together with the director after having broken out in “the summer of 85” of Ozon, but which forces him to play in a radically different, all retained register, with steep and autonomous back. It is not easy to make the absence of a vacuum which is the node of Meursault which registers on the screen in the presence. But Meursault de Voisin, for all that he has of chameleic and cheese qualities – change the angle or separation in his hair and he can look like a fully different person – is consistent in the stability of his gaze. By the way, it is interesting to read that Ozon deplores the cast of Mastroianni in the Visconti version in 1967 of the Camus book and wishes that it is Alain Delon; Delon’s first major role, of course, was like Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” by René Clément. But Meursault is not a sociopath. He never manipulates. He never lies.
The most striking non -textual indulgence Ozon allows itself at the beginning. After the vintage logo of Gaumont has enlightened, we get a brief and rich context of Algiers archive images from the 1930s. An excitable advertiser tromits the virtues of this magnificent and fun place with all the obstacles of a guide, while optimistic gramophone music plays. But even if it is still in this register, the mood of images changes. A group of Arabs looks hostile to the camera. A wall is graffiti with “national liberation front”. Elsewhere, a group of white residents holds banners declaring their allegance – and that of Algeria to France. (Algerian independence would not occur for another three decades.) While music becomes the score of Fatima al-Qaddiri with its intelligence of modern and classic elements, these more grumpy images are transformed perfectly into our introduction to Meursault, which is thrown into prison. One of his sentenced colleagues asks him in what he is. Looking at the level, aware that he is probably the only white one in all overcrowded, Meursault clearly states: “I killed an Arab.”
Like the book, the film is divided in two, with the first part dealing with the funeral of the mother of Meursault and the Torpid sun days, the surfing and the sex that follows it. With Clement Selitzki editing at a rhythm without haste – which feels like the episodic time that Meursault experiences time, without much sense of causality between a day and the next or an event and the next – we accompany Meursault during his trip to Care where the body of his mother is preparing. He doesn’t want to see the body. He does not speak to other residents. And, of course, he does not cry, throughout the vigil, he maintains on his coffin at night before burial. After the service, he goes to the beach.
There, with the monochrome photography which revels in the creamy waves, the high shadows and sea waters, high shadows and sea waters, are all delighted with the skin, awareness and self -development of Rebecca, a formidable Rebecca Marders. (It was “Le Schpountz” of 1938, alias “Heartbeat”, with Fernandel who is appointed by Camus). She laughs, he doesn’t. But he can feel her standing and later, they have sex, after which Marie falls slightly in love in him and wants to get married. Meursault nods, but with a brutal nonchalantly frankness as to his motivations, which have nothing to do with love.
Meanwhile, the friends of Meursault, Sintès (Pierre Lottin), a little mean work, it would be a pimp, beat his Arab mistress Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and is threatened by his brothers. And his old gruff neighbor and Salamano crust (Denis Lavant) beat his dog, but cries and tells sentimental stories when it fled (if it is not quite the role that Denis Lavant was born to play, then it certainly resembles the one who did not wait to have aged there). Violence, in particular by men on the creatures they believe to be lower than them, is in the Algerian air. This may be what rushes to fill the vacuum cleaner where the morality of Meursault should be. Or perhaps, when he presses this trigger later on this beach and, as he tells us “bothers the balance of the day”, thus inaugurating the second part, which deals exclusively from his incarceration, it is only a draw, an inactive curiosity, a tower of light.
The major realization of Ozon’s film is to adapt literature without literalizing (there are only two narrative districts which are directly removed from the source), and to honor the mystery of the novel without trying to solve it. His strengthening of female characters, with Djemila and especially Marie, gave notes richer to play than the narrative in the first person of the book ever authorized, is certainly welcome. And its 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 film’s Meursault remains beautifully resistant to diagnosis or psychologization. How comforting it would be to be able to categorize your state and take the appropriate measures to immunize us! As it is comforting and false, and there is little comfort about “abroad” detached from Ozon, with the exception maybe the preview that he grants us in the abyss, from which we can withdraw into the tender indifference of the world.
