The central plot point of The Stranger – a coloniser kills one of the colonised, and there are consequences – lands very differently now that it did when the original novella was published by Albert Camus in occupied France in 1942. For one thing, the world is trying with mixed success to even out power differentials, and for another, France is finally starting to reckon with its own colonial history. Writer-director François Ozon, a major talent in France though his films are less consistently distributed elsewhere, specialises in stories about intrigue, whether criminal, sexual or both. Here the intrigue is not at all whether the murderer did it, but why. As a concept it has lost none of its compelling disgust. But the story of an absence will always have an absence at its center, and none of the incredible talent here is equal to the task of repairing it.
Of course, no one could. It’s the late 1930s in Algiers and Mersault (Benjamin Voisin, who here mutes the charisma on such display in his starring role in TV show Carême) is a pied-noir, that is to say, a white guy born and brought up there. He spends his free time either at the whites-only swimming club or hanging out with his neighbours, notably Sintès (Pierre Lottin), a pimp and the kind of charmer who brags about how much he beats up his girlfriend (Hajar Bouzaouit). The girlfriend is Algerian, with a brother who objects to how Sintès treats her, and who often stalks Sintès and Mersault around town to try to put the frighteners on them. It doesn’t work, not least because Sintès is the kind of man who’d complain about heaven to God himself, but also because their racial privilege means they see nothing to worry about.
In the midst of this Mersault gets the news his mother, who has been living in a religious retirement community outside the city, has died. He walks out of work to attend her funeral in the clothes he’s standing up in. He sheds no tears, expresses no interest in her life or her friends, and certainly says nothing to the old man who had become his mother’s boyfriend. On his return home he starts sleeping with a former colleague named Marie (Rebecca Marder), and his small kindnesses to her are about the only emotion Mersault ever expresses. But later, when he finds himself alone with the girlfriend’s brother, he does the thing there’s no coming back from. And he’s surprised that other people are upset about it.
Well, surprised is too strong a word. Mersault is the embodiment of the absurdism and existentialism which was Camus’s core philosophy: the idea that the world is meaningless and therefore nothing anybody does, good or bad, matters. This is extremely appealing to teenage nihilists and exhausting nonsense to everybody else, though far too many young men who feel stifled and bored by the world around them really enjoy leaning into the negative side of this. But nobody gets famous by saying if life is meaningless let’s make it better, and certainly Camus, who was himself a pied-noir, grew up watching the enforcement of local segregation and the global rise of Nazism from a front-row seat. So the fact that Mersault is held responsible for his actions is a surprise, even as Mersault himself is indifferent to the consequences. Prison doesn’t matter, the court case doesn’t matter, the priest (Swann Arlaud) is wasting his time and Marie’s tears should never have been shed. All kinds of other bad things are happening every day, so this one being singled out is kind of a drag, but that’s about it.
Except of course it isn’t, and what Mr. Ozon is attempting to do here is restore dignity to the Arab characters (such as by giving them names in passing, which they don’t have in the book), though he doesn’t go as far as giving them dialogue. The focus here is squarely on Mersault and his idea that he can float through life without consequence. Manu Dacosse’s black-and-white cinematography is as crisp and mannered as Mersault’s ironed clothes, and the way the film is staged makes it clear that Mersault’s arrogance is only that of the other white characters put into words. While the thoughtless, blinding racism of the white people here might be part of the reason for what happened, it’s no excuse, and it certainly never answers the central question: if it didn’t matter, then why did he do it?
It is very hard to make a movie about an absence, but Mr. Voisin comes as close as anybody could, in a complimentary fashion, to demonstrating how surface is everything. And yet Mr. Ozon’s choice not to revisit how this story is told – this could all have been done from Sintès’ girlfriend’s point of view, for example – means that the darkness here is merely revisited. Perhaps everyone involved in the project gazed too long into the abyss. Perhaps the abyss did not wish to be perceived. None of this is to say The Stranger is badly done, not at all. It’s just that for a modern version of the story there’s not a lot of modernity here to be found.
The Stranger is now in limited theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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