‘The Stranger’ Turns Existentialism Into Something Dangerous

The characters in The Stranger, French director François Ozon’s beautiful, haunting adaptation of Albert Camus’s canonical novel, are African, many of them by birth. But they live in a 1930s colonial Algiers that’s essentially a replica of France. Meursault, the film’s amoral existential protagonist, tells his girlfriend, who’s never been to Paris, that Parisians are pale, and that the city is dirty and full of pigeons. He works for a French company, eats in a French restaurant, sends his elderly mother off to die in a French rest home, swims at a French-only beach, and goes to the cinema at a theater that forbids indigenous Algerians from attending. The only time Meursault encounters Algerians is when he passes them on the street or sits adjacent to them on a bus. That is, until he murders one.

The Stranger ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: François Ozon
Written by: François Ozon
Starring: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin
Running time: 122 mins

The Stranger is an extended parable of existential morality. Meursault is indifferent to his girlfriend Marie, who clearly loves him. He displays no real emotion at the death of his mother. Even after “killing an Arab,” he seems resigned to his fate, refusing to submit to the will of God, not really caring whether he lives or dies. He lives completely in the moment, without pretension or affect.

Ozon captures Camus’s philosophy with great precision. His approach is eerie and affecting. When Meursault has his emotional climax toward the end of the movie, in a jail-cell encounter with a priest, the moment is both terrifying and completely earned, because we’ve wafted along with Meursault in a kind of existentialist haze up until then.

Thanks to some historical distance from the subject, Ozon is able to do what Orson Welles was unable to do in his 1946 version of The Stranger. He turns a philosophical discourse into a mostly subtle treatise on colonialism. There are a couple of moments where Ozon drops the hammer, and those are the film’s least effective. In a courtroom, the movie’s only scene without Meursault. Marie approaches the sister of Meursault’s murder victim, who makes a comment along the lines of “All anyone cares about is your boyfriend and his philosophy. Arabs are invisible.” It’s a thesis statement in a film that doesn’t need one.

At the film’s end, the sister visits the grave of her brother, and we see his name on the tombstone. Again, it brings down the boom when a little subtlety would do. The Algerians can’t afford the luxury of Meursault’s languid existentialism. They’re prisoners in occupied colonial territory, forced to glower resentfully as their French occupiers pimp them out, widen their boulevards, and sip cafés au lait in their faces.

That thesis works best in this adaptation when it’s subtext, which it usually is. Ozon is a clever filmmaker, and his cleverness never gets in the way of the film. It opens with a kind of newsreel, immersing us in the time period, and it never breaks character until the closing credits, when Ozon, to great effect, sets to The Cure’s 1980s hit, “Killing An Arab,” also an adaptation of Camus’s novel.

The Stranger is in beautiful black-and-white, and at times feels like something restored from the golden age of Italian neorealism, or the French New Wave. Benjamin Voisin is pitch-perfect as Meursault, giving off pure Jean-Paul Belmondo or young Alain Delon vibes. Rebecca Marder is lovely and affecting as Marie, projecting purity, kindness, innocence, and also a kind of ignorance at the small part she’s playing in what we know will soon become a tense and violent political struggle.

The Stranger frames Meursault’s violent act — and his subsequent, baffling indifference to its consequences — as the first blow in what would become the Battle of Algiers. “I did it because of the sun,” he says. That momentary heat stroke on the beach briefly shakes colonial Algiers out of its moral torpor, but in no way does it prepare the French occupiers for what’s to come. That subtext, as well as a faithful adaptation of one of Western literature’s greatest novels, puts Ozon’s The Stranger in the conversation for the year’s best film.