Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching François Ozon‘s “The Stranger” is not entirely dissimilar to that of reading the 1942 classic novel of alienation and dissociation by Albert Camus. Wisely, Ozon only rarely goes beyond the text; instead he invests significant creative energy into mimicking the affectless but oddly seductive tone of the novel in purely cinematic terms. So the gaps between Camus’ crisp, declarative sentences become the slivers of time lost to the cuts between coolly choreographed scenes. And the book’s bracingly straightforward descriptions of often inexplicable behaviors and thought processes, become the hard, stark edges of a sculptural black-and-white photography that is all the more mysterious for apparently having nothing to hide.
Embodying the enigma at the heart of it all is Benjamin Voisin playing Meursault, the character who famously kills a man on a beach mere days after attending the funeral of his mother, at which he did not cry. And Voisin is superb in a role that reunites him with the director after breaking out in Ozon’s “Summer of 85,” but that requires him to play in a radically different register, all withholding, stiff-backed, self-containment.It is not easy to make the void-like absence that is the crux of Meursault’s being register on screen as a presence. But Voisin’s Meursault, for all he has some chameleonic, Ripley-like qualities – change the angle, or the parting in his hair and he can look like a wholly different person – is consistent in the unnerving steadiness of his gaze.As an aside it’s interesting to read that Ozon laments the casting of Mastroianni in Visconti’s 1967 version of Camus’ book and wishes it had been Alain Delon; delon’s first major role, of course, was as Tom ripley in Rene Clément’s “Purple Noon.” But Meursault is no sociopath.He never manipulates. He never lies.
The most striking non-textual indulgence Ozon allows himself comes at the very start. After the vintage Gaumont logo flashes up, we get a brief, rich contextualizing montage of archival footage of 1930s Algiers. An excitable announcer trumpets the virtues of this gorgeous, fun-packed place with all the gusto of a tour guide, while upbeat gramophone music plays. But even while he’s still in that register, the mood of the images changes. A group of Arabs stare hostilely at the camera. A wall is graffiti-ed with “National Liberation Front.” Elsewhere a group of white residents hold up banners declaring their – and Algeria’s – allegiance to France.(Algerian independence would not happen for another three decades.) As the music becomes Fatima Al Qaddiri’s score with its clever commingling of modern and classical elements, these grittier images segue seamlessly into our introduction to Meursault, who is being thrown into prison. One of his fellow convicts asks him what he’s in for. Eyeing him levelly, aware that he is probably the lone white guy in