First published in 1942, Albert Camus’ The Stranger — also known as The Outsider — was a popular fashion accessory in the post-punk ’70s, being heavy in content and light enough in weight to carry around in the pockets of the overcoats worn by devotees of the British band Joy Division. That it was what you might nowadays call “a quick read” undoubtedly contributed to its popularity, and its troubled hero spoke volumes to moody, rebellious teenagers who’d moved on from Catcher in the Rye. Around the same time, it gave proto-goth band The Cure an early hit in the form of “Killing an Arab”, which perfectly distilled the themes and narrative of the novel into two minutes and 21 seconds of art-rock.
By contrast, The Stranger — the latest film from François Ozon, a French director as protean and prolific as America’s Richard Linklater — is a perfectly crafted but somewhat laborious stab at the book’s dark heart; while it’s very, very faithful, it somehow seems much more drawn out and much less economical. In its favor, though, it is incredibly stylish, a shimmering monochrome affair that looks like a brand-new silver nitrate print of a ’40s melodrama. This being Ozon, however, there is also a mischievous flavor of homoeroticism, and, particularly in the prison scenes that open and punctuate it, it seems to owe a debt to Un Chant D’Amour, the one only film directed by the literary outlaw Jean Genet in 1950.
It begins with newsreel footage of Algiers, touting the gentrification of the city under French rule. It is portrayed as a melting pot of cultures, but graffiti promoting the Algerian Liberation Front suggest the reality is not quite so harmonious. From there, we go to the local prison, where a young man is thrown into a cell with dozens of other, mostly dark-skinned men. “What did you do?” he is asked, in Arabic. “I killed an Arab,” he says, without any trace of emotion, which, of course, doesn’t exactly make him Prisoner of the Week.
The young man is Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), and, in flashback, the film then reveals the chain of circumstance that has led him there, starting with the death of his mother, which was Camus’ original opening gambit. As in the book, Meursault is unmoved by her passing, taking two days off work to grudgingly visit the rest home where he put her and sit with her coffin overnight. He’s asked if he’d like to see her one last time. No, he says. Why not? “There’s no point.” A day or so later he visits the local baths — Les Bains d’Algiers — where he meets an old flame, Marie (Rebecca Marder), and they become lovers.
The events unfold just as they do in the novel, largely revolving around Meursault’s curious stable of neighbors, notably Salamano (Denis Lavant), a crusty old man who loves but beats his equally mangey dog, and, more significantly, Raymond (Pierre Lottin), a pimp by any other name, who treats his women just as roughly. And it is Raymond’s affair with an Arab woman named Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) that sends Meursault’s life spinning out of control, when, for reasons he is later unable to explain, he shoots her brother five times after an altercation on the beach on a hot summer’s day.
In the book, Camus explains all this through an engaging first-person narrative, but Ozon bins all that in favor of showing not telling. It’s a bold gambit but one that doesn’t quite work; Voisin certainly has a boyish charm, but the character’s indifference is hard to get into, like when Marie suggests they get married. “If you want,” he shrugs, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of his (psycho) pathology. In literature, Meursault embodies the existentialist ideal: If you don’t believe in anything, nothing matters, and the casual anarchy of that might sound sexy and fun, especially if you’re young, disenfranchised and alienated or, let’s face it, just French. On film, however, it quickly becomes kind of boring.
By contrast, though, this is one of Ozon’s most strikingly beautiful films to date, and it would make a great faux-retro double bill with Richard Linklater’s terrific Cannes hit Nouvelle Vague (weirdly, Linklater’s film is arguably the most stereotypically French of the two, although, admittedly, someone does say “Ooh-la-la” in Ozon’s). The book, however, has a philosophical resonance that the film tries very hard to replicate but can’t, culminating in a long discussion with a priest (Swann Arlaud) that makes the ending seem a hell of a long time coming. Ironically, The Cure’s Robert Smith dealt with all this ennui in a simple lyric. “Whichever I choose, it amounts to the same,” he sang. “Absolutely nothing.”
Title: The Stranger
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: François Ozon
Screenwriter: François Ozon, from the novel by Albert Camus
Cast: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant, Swann Arlaud
Sales agent: Gaumont
Running time: 2 hrs 3 mins
