François Ozon reinterprets the Camus classic.
So many politicians and pundits misuse the term “existential crisis” that French director François Ozon must rectify it with his new film version of The Stranger, the 1942 Albert Camus novel that popularized the notion of existentialism.
Ozon’s glossy corrective polishes the famous story of Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French bureaucrat settled in Algiers who kills an Arab native without regret for either the murder or his own execution. Camus challenged the meaning of life against the inevitability of death with a spare, anti-sentimental style that challenged conventional pieties. It impressed generations of college students, while apparently confusing poli-sci majors who turn Camus’s insight into cheap rhetoric.
Camus’s traumatized worldview, influenced by the WWII Nazi Occupation of France, gets made over in Ozon’s highly stylized acknowledgment of the novel’s impact on modern culture. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosse films in black-and-white not for period effect but to convey an atmosphere that encompasses decades of cultural reflection that the novel inspired.
Ozon’s establishing sequence of mid-20th-century Algiers is vivid in the same way that Julián Hernández’s B&W opus Raging Sun, Raging Sky distilled cinema vérité into mythic imagery. It purposefully blends Julien Duvivier’s melodrama Pépé Le Moko with Gillo Pontecorvo’s quasi-documentary The Battle of Algiers. This compresses France’s still-wounded colonialist relationship to Algeria, including romance, remorse, and the Marxist guilt instilled by Jean Genet, Frantz Fanon, and other intellectuals enlightened in the wake of Camus.
The residue of imperialism glistens ironically in Ozon’s pictorial splendor as Meursault goes through his ruling-class involvement with fellow pied noir French expatriates: his avid mistress, Marie Cardona (Rebecca Marder); a friendly pimp, Sintès (Pierre Lottin); and a lonely old man, Salamano (Denis Lavant). All are transplanted colonists, nonchalant about social distance from the natives regarded as a lower class — here referred to as “indigenous.”
Camus never used the term “indigenous,” but Ozon does, deliberately employing its contemporary ideological load for his personal cinematic nostalgia. Although Luchino Visconti’s full-color 1967 adaptation treated Meursault (played by Marcello Mastroianni) as a universal art-house figure of contemporary disillusionment, equal to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, this Meursault personifies Ozon’s regular fixation on sexuality that defines identity. Though Voisin, who played the doomed hero in the 2016 film of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, is not a greatly empathetic actor like Mastroianni, he brings wide-eyed, delicate-featured fashion-model hauteur and sexual ambiguity to Ozon’s Meursault.
The sexual tension between Voisin and Marder, and Voisin and Lottin (hetero coupling contrasts with masculine intimidation), is also felt between these Europeans and the Algerian Arabs. It is this erotic class conflict that sparks Meursault’s criminally pumping several bullets into a human being. Meursault’s fascination with the Arab boy’s swarthy otherness is complicated by palpable exotic effects (the blinding sun, shimmering heat waves, the boy’s tumescent pose, and reflections from his drawn knife blade).
These details intensify Meursault’s alienation. But then the narrative shifts to his trial, and when issues turn political, Ozon loses focus. Visconti and Mastroianni stuck to the lost man’s withdrawal and disaffection — the mystery that always made Camus’s story compelling. Yet, for Ozon, it dissolves into stylistic affectation.
On trial, Meursault’s alarming actions (“It was like knocking four quick times on misfortune’s door”) are subjected to PC explanation: “You’re not the first or the last to be accused of killing an Arab,” says his defense attorney (Jean-Charles Clichet). “You won’t be faulted for that. Trust me, I know the French justice system.” Tacking-on The Cure’s pop tune “Killing an Arab” makes for a frivolous prop.
In Camus’s great enigma, colonialist racism was subliminal yet apparent. With his visual chic, Ozon reduces that paradox to fashionable politics, suggesting a collaboration between director David Fincher and photographer Bruce Weber. It glosses over crude prison-cell graffiti from Genet’s Un Chant d’amour, misreading existentialism the same way obtuse pundits misunderstand it, diminishing the human condition to nihilism.
At his best, Ozon evokes comedy or tragedy that feels surreal (Ricky, Young & Beautiful, Frantz, Double Lover, By the Grace of God), but the dream sequence of Meursault meeting his fate in a surreal desert merely looks fancy. It seems hollow when he says, “Nothing matters. This life is absurd. We’re all guilty, we’re all condemned.”
Ozon’ s Millennial interpretation robs the scene of its existential force when Meursault tells Marie, “I kill time.” (Ozon’s topicality also lacks the depth that André Téchiné brought to modern race trials when transposing the Tawana Brawley case to France in Girl on the Train.) Ozon’s The Stranger is beautiful to look at, but it dodges the fact that in our contemporary reality, “existentialism” is being ignored in favor of political distortion.
