As in the source material, the beauty of the title of François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Music Box, $27.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD) is that it can refer to any number of its players. Surely there’s the mysterious protagonist, the emotionally inert Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), whose office job is as undefined as his first name, a hallmark of existentialist fiction. But the stranger could also be the young Arab man whom he kills on a beach with no obvious motive. In Ozon’s film, we know nothing of this character on whom the slim narrative pivots; he enters and exits like the wind.
Or the title, if pluralized, could refer to the entire indigenous underclass of French-occupied Algeria, the fraught setting of Camus’ nihilistic parable. Like non-playable characters in a video game, the anonymous Arabian population — ever-present but denied service at the bistros and cinemas and baths — creates the ambient political subtext for Ozon’s masterful direction.
Ozon opens the story not with the novella’s famous first line — “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” — but with a vintage, propagandistic newsreel of French Algeria touting its blend of cultures as a marriage of “the Occident and the Orient.” It’s through the colonizers’ deliberately misleading lens of history that we meet Meursault. The old documentary footage blends seamlessly into a new image, blurry and slowly developing into focus, of Meursault hauled into prison. A minute later, he’ll informing an inquiring Muslim inmate of his crime: “I killed an Arab.”
The Stranger, though adapted twice before, in Italian (by Luchino Visconti) and Turkish, has long been considered “unadaptable,” which may be why Hollywood, ever wary of commercial viability, has never attempted to film it. But Ozon, through an approach that values the sensorial over the literary, has cracked the code, producing a film that stands boldly on its own, and that revels in its pure cinema-ness.
Little dialogue is exchanged in the opening 45 minutes, and most of it is procedural, or the sort of idle chitchat about the weather for which Meursault has little bandwidth. He receives a telegram informing him of his mother’s death, which he absorbs dispassionately over a coffee and cigarette in his apartment, Ozon scrutinizing every inch of Voisin’s Greco-Roman features for a reaction and receiving none. It’s the first hint of this remarkably suppressed performance, which would fit perfectly in the cinematic world of Robert Bresson or Chantal Akerman. In an interview included in the Blu-ray, he says that in preparing for the role, “I worked to make my soul heavier for months.”
Meursault dutifully takes off work to attend his mother’s funeral and meet, if never converse with, the fellow residents of her nursing home in the countryside, including her hobbled, weeping fiancé. Again, few words are exchanged, which befits Meursault’s laconic personality as well as Ozon’s atmospheric command of sound and vision. The scenes run on the director’s particular eye for detail: We can feel the dry heat of the arid surroundings, the punishing glare of a single bulb in the dank mortuary room, the long and leathery faces of the deceased’s elderly companions — strangers all.
This same attention to peripheries, to the lifting of background details into the foreground, will continue back in the city, where Meursault enjoys watching the world from his balcony, observing the banal activities of his neighbors like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, and occasionally tracking beetles and moths with the same inscrutable focus. (In the interview featurette, Ozon says he liked to think of Meursault as an entomologist whose detached interest extends to humanity.) Along the way, he reconnects with an old friend, Marie (Rebecca Marder), and they hook up, their budding courtship inspiring the sort of sensual imagery that elevated Ozon on the international stage: His shots of their glistening, wet bodies in repose on a raft on the ocean conjure 2003’s Swimming Pool.
But to Meursault, “love means nothing,” and marriage is of “no importance.” Though Marie continues to fish for any sign that his affection mirrors hers, she receives nothing but shrugs and uncertainty from a character who is unaffected by everything, from the affairs of the heart to the abuses of his neighbors — one of whom, Raymond (Peirre Lottin), a pimp whose violent treatment of an indigenous prostitute leads, eventually, to Meursault’s terrible decision on the beach — to the French colonizers’ treatment of the entire native shadow class.
The back half of The Stranger, much talkier than the first, covers Meursault’s trial, the most literal showcase for Camus’ existentialism: “Everything is true, and nothing is true,” sighs the exasperated prosecuting attorney as he tries to assemble a motivation for the defendant. We’ve seen Meursault decline from taking any action for any reason; why this? Ozon is wise enough to swim in this ambiguity — to, as he frames it in the featurette, “raise questions without giving answers.”
The scene of the crime itself offers a clue, in what may be the director’s boldest montage in the film. The camera follows Meursault’s gaze as it takes in the hot, wet form of his soon-to-be victim, lingering on his armpit hair, his smile, and then eventually his pocketknife, positioned as less of a weapon than a phallus, which captures the sun’s glare and blinds Meursault in the seconds before he fires. The homoerotic subtext of the moment could have been lifted from Ozon’s same-sex romance Summer of 85.
This could explain a lot, or it could explain nothing. That’s the elusive endurance of Camus, and, at his best, of Ozon. We’re all strangers here ourselves.