Late this morning I caught Francois Ozon‘s The Stranger, a clean, precise and matter-of-fact adaptation of the classic 1942 Albert Camus novella, which I’ve been read about for years and therefore have had a passing familiarity with but have never actually, like, uhm, read.
Nor have I ever seen Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation, which costarred Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina. But the Camus novella has long been regarded as a masterpiece of chilly existentialism, and processing the randomness of life and fate in existential terms has always appealed to my suburban malcontent mindset so I’ve been “on the team” for decades, in a sense.
Set in late 1930s or ’40s French Algeria (definitely pre-Battle of Algiers), Ozon’s The Stranger, which adheres closely to the Camus narrative, is about an aloof, taciturn but mild-mannered fellow named Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) who isn’t given to rapturous celebration of anything. As in, like, nothing.
Except for the joy of sex, that is, with a young single woman named Marie (Rebecca Marder), a typist whom he knew from a workplace and whom he quickly seduces after attending his mother’s funeral, where he alienated fellow mourners by not showing even slight traces of emotion.
A polite, disciplined sort who’s into an exceedingly dry form of anhedonia, Mersault’s fate is sealed in a beach altercation in which he’s vaguely provoked by a native Algerian ruffian over some local incident of cruelty. He almost dispassionately puts five bullets into the guy, and soon after goes on trial for murder while steadfastly refusing to deny guilt or offer some kind of rationale for the shooting, much less plead for mercy.
Mersault’s basic attitude is “life sucks any way you slice it plus I’m just cruising along atop my laid-back-because-nothing-matters mental surfboard, and we’re all going to die sooner or later so who gives a shit?” and so on.
Mersault is a Nowhere Man but doesn’t mind this in the least. He feels no delight or worship in his veins because he’s just an office functionary without a love life or any devotional artistic passion or the blessings of a beautiful granddaughter or a dog or a cat or anything. He doesn’t even have social media to get lost in and sedated by.
So the Ozon film hit me fresh, and left me…well, generally swept along, never bored and consumed in contemplation.
Camus’s dry, chilly narrative is pretty much straight from the text, Voisson’s performance is appropriately curt and contained, Manuel Dacosse‘s black-and-white cinematography is luscious and razor-sharp, Marder is touching and tantalizing, the supporting cast (which includes Holy Motors costar Denis Lavant), and the 120-minute length just flies right by.
As I was approaching the main festival headquarters I was suddenly ten feet from the ginger-haired Voison, who was posing for a quick photo. I wanted to snap a photo also but I wasn’t fast enough. If I’d dropped a Lemon 714 a half-hour earlier I would have waved and said “yo, bruh!…just saw the film, and I’m on the team!…a fan, I mean.”
