There’s a chameleonic high quality to François Ozon; in contrast to many auteurs, he doesn’t merely remake the identical movie in numerous guises. The cool, voyeuristic gaze of Charlotte Rampling within the psychosexual thriller “Swimming Pool” is nothing just like the Catherine Denueve-led musical “8 Girls,” simply because the slippery, nesting doll of tales “Within the Home” is a world away from the camp and kinky erotic thriller “L’Amant Double.”
Cohering his physique of labor is a non-judgmental curiosity about socially transgressive conduct and a aptitude for capturing the physique warmth of sexuality. In bringing Albert Camus’ absurdist 1942 novella “The Stranger” to the display, Ozon harnesses an embodied, erotic facet of the story, which is kind of a flex contemplating that the guide is famed for that includes a protagonist so indifferent that it prices him every little thing.
Which isn’t to say that it is a subversive rewrite of the textual content. The important thing modifications contain bringing out the person humanity and political turmoil of the native Algerian characters, described by the guide’s first-person narrator uniformly as “The Arab/s.” Save for barely fleshing out a few of these roles, Ozon’s script is loyal to the purpose of lifting most traces of dialogue verbatim. Not that the taciturn protagonist has a lot to say: “I don’t know” is his favourite reply.
Like Camus, the protagonist, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin from “Summer season of ‘85”) is a French-Algerian residing in Algeria throughout the time of indigénat, a code imposed by French colonial rule that gave the indigenous inhabitants inferior authorized standing and harsher punishments. Ozon swiftly conveys the underlying battle with an establishing shot of graffiti that reads “Algerian Liberation Entrance” after which one other of activists advocating for the French language.
This isn’t the sort of battle that Meursault is prone to concern himself with. He’s a neatly contained presence, exhibiting no response to opening a telegram that reads: “MOTHER DECEASED, BURIAL TOMORROW.” Filmed in lush, Bressonian black-and-white by director of pictures Manuel Dacosse, Voisin instructions the digital camera’s gaze, whilst his personal stays opaque. He smokes like a chimney, sweeping butt after butt to rosebud lips earlier than stubbing them out with extra vitality than he’ll use till his subsequent cigarette. His hair (typically slicked again, typically with a forelock shaken unfastened) is essentially the most dynamic facet of his persona. Shaving is a ritual too. He capably enacts the routines of life, it’s within the area of social efficiency that he — a budding Bartleby — would like to not.
Nonetheless, Meursault travels via the sweaty, stultifying warmth to the remainder house the place his mom handed away and carries off the required loss of life duties, albeit with out shedding a tear. The subsequent day, on the baths in his hometown, he runs right into a younger typist he used to know named Marie (Rebecca Marder). The attraction is on the spot. They dive into the water and swim to a float the place he rests his head on her physique they usually lie, lazily entangled, in a state of sun-drunk near-nudity. Intercourse and loss of life are twins, in spite of everything.
As soon as dressed, she notices his black armband and presents condolences. He doesn’t miss a beat earlier than taking her to the cinema. They fall right into a relationship. And on this a part of his life, ardour burns brightly. Nearer to house, individuals’s feelings are unrulier. Meursault shares his condominium block with neighbors that embrace a shambling outdated man Salamano (Denis Lavant), susceptible to yelling at and beating the canine he loves greater than something. Then there’s Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) whose violent relationship together with his girlfriend, Djemila, units in movement the occasions that come to outline “The Stranger.”
The query of why our protagonist agrees to assist Raymond on this scheme is given area to linger — is it as a result of Raymond buys him with food and drinks? Is it as a result of “Arabs” “don’t rely”? Psychological motive issues lower than the sequence of causal occasions within the anaesthetized environment of “The Stranger” and as an alternative the thriller exists by itself phrases.
Meursault is something however rash. Each time requested to do something, he pauses to suppose. He’s snug saying no. But he says sure when Raymond asks him to jot down Djemila a letter luring her to his flat, the place he plans to manage punishment. The 2 turn out to be nearer and Meursault — with out notably liking the person — is drawn right into a rivalry between the virulently racist Raymond and Djemila’s brother and buddies, who pursue revenge in her identify.
Camus’ slim novel is wedded to Meursault’s point-of-view and he’s framed as a person in the end condemned by his failure to appropriately carry out grief, with the broader social implications of his character left to the reader to unpack. Ozon (with a household historical past that leads again to French colonial Algeria) does a few of that unpacking so the character is subtly reweighted, with the social position he chooses to occupy that means as a lot as the results of his jarring mode of expression.
The early presentation of the movie is as smooth and charged as a cat on a phone wire. Crisp black-and-white visuals of a really photogenic, very unusual man are scored by Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri’s eerie music, and even for those who haven’t learn the guide, the sense is that this is not going to finish properly. The interval recreation of ’30s Algiers is shot although with class, and there’s a fetishistic consideration to the fantastic thing about faces, locations and issues. In the meantime, Voisin provides a cerebral efficiency of a person who occupies and contributes to a thrillingly tactile area whereas his antennae are attuned to a different realm fully.
The state of alienation that permeates and infuses Camus’ prose is the lacking ingredient right here and, with out it, Meursault cuts a really totally different determine — much less adrift in ennui and extra deliberately nihilistic. As Ozon has it, he’s a beautiful and important loner whose impulsive act of violence is pre-empted by a second of erotic transference. Its aftermath places him right into a authorized system that, per his lawyer, wouldn’t fault him for what he did to an Arab, however his earlier failure to cry at his mom’s funeral? Prison.
Ozon succeeds at drumming up at a heady environment infused by the expectations of white supremacy and neurotypicality and — second by second — there are particulars to feast upon. Swann Arlaud from “Anatomy of a Fall” exhibits up as a priest who unlocks extra phrases in ten minutes than Mersault has spoken in the results of the movie put-together. This character growth does not likely land, nevertheless, and Mersault turns into more and more hazy, disappearing right into a cloud of abstraction within the third act.
The extent of craft current in creating the temper is transfixing and the movie works as a fever dream set within the tail-end of French colonial rule. However as an specific adaption of the guide by a thoughts within the strategy of birthing existentialism, it doesn’t fairly have the requisite braveness or — dare I say it — strangeness.
Grade: B-
“The Stranger” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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