I never read the original 1942 French novella by Albert Camus, but this stylish, beautiful and unsettling adaptation casts a haunting spell of its own.
I watched The Stranger a few weeks ago, and usually a window for writing a review would be closed by now, but I feel like this film still lingers somewhere deep under my skin. Not knowing anything about it other than a general impression of critical acclaim, I was completely unprepared for where this story, set in 1940s French Algeria, would take its enigmatic antihero. As it begins, a young man is thrown into a crowded jail cell in Algiers. When asked why he is there, his laconic reply is that he killed an Arab.
The film eventually catches up with the present day and the repercussions of the crime, but until then we see the fairly ordinary life of Mersault (Benjamin Voisin) in flashbacks. He is a quiet, detached young man with a dull office job, living by himself in an austere apartment. He is not oblivious to sensory experiences like sex, but indifference still seems to be Mersault’s defining characteristic, colouring his reactions whether it be a chance of promotion and transfer to Paris, or news of his mother’s death.
Meursault travels to the rural care home where his mother has lived out her last years, and attends her funeral, all the while displaying the same blank unconcern. Nothing seems to move him, including the sight of his mother’s elderly admirer and fiancé collapsing from heat exhaustion and grief. I remember wondering briefly why the funeral was given so much attention and screen time, given the lack of obvious connection with any kind of murder, not realising that Mersault’s emotional indifference and lack of appropriate grieving will be later held against him and how. Perversely, it ends up casting him in a worse light than the killing of an indigene.
Back home, Meursault falls into a relationship with a beautiful girl who finds his radical honesty and disinterest in social norms attractive, even if she’s aware that these same qualities may one day break her heart. The two engage in passionate lovemaking and Marie is very much set on marrying her young man, a prospect that evokes a typically apathetic reaction. We also meet a couple of Meursault’s odious acquaintances, a cranky old man who beats his dog, and another neighbour named Raymond, a seedy type who is exploiting his Arab girlfriend Djemila. Unmoved by any of these cruelties, Meursault allows himself to be involved when Raymond gets into trouble with Djemila’s brother. It all ends on a seashore with the heat of the blazing sun, a glint of a knife blade, and a murder without meaning.
There is nothing else in this strikingly gorgeous monochrome film that’s photographed with as much care as its inscrutable protagonist. Benjamin Voisin is a handsome man, but under director François Ozon’s gaze he becomes simply the most beautiful and desirable man alive, mesmerising even when he’s perfectly still and doing nothing. Or smoking – I cannot stand smoking in real life and gag at the cigarette smell, but damn if it’s not cinematic onscreen, with those poisonous fumes unfurling oh so sensuously.
It’s not just the physical beauty that draws you in. It’s tempting to try and put together the pieces of what exactly led to Meursault’s nihilistic detachment: past trauma, intellectual pursuits, natural temperament and disposition? Or even repressed sexuality, hinted by the intense interest the camera seems to take in the young Arab man Meursault ends up killing? I’ve no idea if the book makes these any clearer, but the film’s ambiguity does a lot to enhance the character’s enigma. Voisin is simply stellar in what must have been a difficult role.
Despite the initial hook of murder that would be at home in a crime thriller, The Stranger moves at a languid pace that, along with its haunting score, adds to its uneasy, at times dreamlike atmosphere. I could be mistaken, but the film’s anti-colonial sentiment feels very much like a modern addition from a contemporary perspective, though it never beats you over the head and reveals it mostly in visual details and telling exchanges of dialogue. I’m now very keen to read the original novella and see how it colours my view of the film, and vice versa.
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