François Ozon and Albert Camus do not seem like a obvious fit. The French filmmaker’s rather louche and uninhibited style seems at odds with Camus’ trademark ennui, the patron saint of university students who smoke roll-ups and have a single tiny hoop earring. Yet Ozon has adapted Camus’ most well-known novella, The Stranger, which concerns a young Frenchman in Algiers who stands trial for the murder of a local man in cold blood. He doesn’t deny the charge, or offer a defence. The mystery is his total disinterest in the matter.
The coltish Benjamin Voisin, who also starred Ozon’s in Summer of ’85, plays Meursault. He appears a passenger in his own life, someone who things happen to rather than one who makes things happen, disinterested in everything and everyone. His listlessness is almost comic; never once does Meursault threaten to show any true emotion, even when he is informed by telegram of his mother’s death. He asks his employer for two days off work and travels to the care home she was living in to take care of funeral arrangements; the staff there are disquieted by his apparent lack of emotion at her passing.
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Back in Algiers, he feels similarly unmoved by a job opportunity, his repugnant neighbours and even his new girlfriend. He seems incapable of feeling, and perhaps it’s a testament to Voisin’s talent that he makes such a compelling presence all the same, angelic but awful, totally agnostic to the world but not quite veering into depression.
When the inevitable murder occurs, Meursault raises his neighbour’s handgun and shoots four bullets into the victim. We learn, having spent enough time with the young man, he has no idea why he did it. Perhaps revenge, but it’s not a compelling argument. This barbaric act of violence by a young man numb to his own privilege is shocking not in its singularity.
But Ozon makes a crucial alteration to Camus’ text. He gives the murdered Algerian his name, which was omitted in the original novel, perhaps to underline how little Meursault cared, perhaps because of its contextual production. Ozon corrects this at any rate, careful to underscore that this was a man – an Algerian, a son, a brother – that Meursault killed. He had a family and a life and didn’t feel numb to the world like Meursault. The racial element of The Stranger is underscored by a newsreel at the top of the film which espouses how lovely Tangiers has become under French governance. The indifference of Meursault seems to parallel the indifference of the state, which the murder and mistreatment of Algerians is par for the course. The crime he commits means nothing in a country already occupied by colonisers. It’s only Meursault’s total lack of defence which shocks the system into action.
The staid black and white photography does add to the oppressive atmosphere of The Stranger, even if it doesn’t provide much in the way of visual intrigue, and the slow pacing of an already slim novel threatens to carry Meursault’s disinterest over to the viewer. Happily there are punctuations in the supporting performances of Denis Levant and Swann Arnaud, masterfully deployed in their small scenes.
The Stranger transfers to film for a third time in mostly compelling fashion, and the small adjustments to Camus’ plot afford a little modernity without a more obvious update. The film doesn’t expect sympathy for the privileged and disimpassioned Meursault, and certainly doesn’t absolve him (not that he wants that anyway). The Stranger reflects the indifference of colonist states and occupiers, inflicting their values and violence for centuries, and how a life of individualism makes us, if not monsters, then certainly cruel.