Film Review - The Stranger
Images courtesy of Palace Films.
“I killed an Arab” says Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, in the opening scene of François Ozon’s new adaptation of The Stranger, Albert Camus’ literary classic. That the film begins with this blunt and immediate shock in lieu of the novel’s famous opener—Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know—is perhaps emblematic of the film’s broader priorities, preserving all the familiar beats of Camus’ story while bringing the subtext to the foreground.
The Stranger follows Meursault, a French settler who lives in Colonial Algeria as a shipping clerk. The turbulence of his environment is contrasted by his apathy towards the world around him. After the death of his mother, he appears indifferent. To his head-over-heels-in-love girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder), he appears indifferent; to his pimp friend Raymond (Pierre Lottin) who beats his girlfriend Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit)—named in the film, referred to as ‘the Arab woman’ in the book—and his neighbour Salamano (Denis Lavant) who beats his dog, indifferent. Meursault’s disposition comes to a head when halfway through the film, in an eternally debated moment of the absurd, he shoots and kills Djemila’s brother Moussa on a hot summer day at the beach.
Whilst the film follows the two-part structure of the book, Ozon’s approach to the source material features a few minor revisions that have major implications on how the text plays out. Meursault is many things: apathetic, a complicit settler, an indifferent sociopath, but he is never as dull to read as he is dull to watch here. Here Camus’ matter-of-fact inner monologue for Meursault–often emotionally detached and invoking the philosophically absurd–is represented by the routine mechanisms of Meursault’s day-to-day life, rarely depicting his internal voice sans a couple lifted quotes from the novel. It is easy then to imagine without prior knowledge of the original text that Meursault as a character is thoughtless, as the film’s attempt to translate his chronicle of life is often sparse, rote and punctuated by empty silence. Once Meursault begins to speak in monologue in the latter half of the film, this drab approach to his temperament in the first half makes his descent far less convincing and compelling.
Another change that Ozon hinges his adaptation on is the attempt to align the audience more sympathetically towards Djemila’s brother, the victim of Meursault’s senseless act. In the film he is afforded slightly more characterisation and his relationship to Meursault is wordlessly implied to be pseudo-sexual. Like his sister Djemila, in this version of the story he is given a name–Moussa Hamdani–though this is largely the extent to which his character is expanded upon. In some way there seems to be a shadow of an attempt to revise the perspective and positionality of French settlers in the novel, but the inclusion of these ostensible and optically progressive markers of identity only draw more attention to lack of groundwork laid to make the Arab characters feel truly three-dimensional. Perhaps this serves part of a cynical point, but largely the approach towards altering the story’s alignment feels tacked on and without boldness to meaningfully interrogate the novel.
That the film’s credits are set to the tune of Killing An Arab–The Cure’s own song about The Stranger–is yet another example of Ozon’s ostensibly stylistic but ultimately adherent approach to Camus’ novel. The inclusion of the song as the final flavour of the film is so comically on-the-nose, completely representative of the film’s hollow stylistic elements. For one, it is entirely shot in black-and-white, which is complemented by its opening scene, a riff on the opening scene of Casablanca, a film likewise set in a 1940s French colony in Africa. The black-and-white cinematography is also deliberately overexposed, emphasising the harsh summer in Algeria and Meursault’s incongruity with it. This would perhaps be a more interesting choice if each image had even a slight amount more texture to it, or even if we could see the characters sweat.
But this tension between benignly opposing features seems precisely where Ozon’s adaptation is positioned. The Stranger exists at the razor’s edge of complacency. Ostensibly revisionist and stylistic, but also perfectly content to operate within the already existing canon of the novel, not ever straying too far or getting too experimental in its approach.
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The Stranger is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.