★★★★½ - THE POST
- French classic yields a superb adaptation -
Back when I was an insufferable teen, all I knew about Albert Camus' novel The Stranger was that it had inspired Robert Smith of The Cure to write Killing An Arab. Which at least did eventually inspire me to pick up a dog-eared paperback, and then plough through its 150 or so pages in a couple of afternoons. After which, all I could think was what an astonishing job Smith had done of distilling the book into a few lines in a song that is all done in two minutes and 20 seconds - and that The Stranger was the most haunting and despairing novel that young Graeme had ever read.
The Stranger (also published as The Outsider ) unfurls in French-ruled Algeria, sometime in the 1930s. A young man named Meursault is adrift and seemingly disconnected from the people and events around him. He meets a young woman named Marie who falls in love with him. But his feelings towards her are circumspect at best.
A neighbour drags Meursault into a pointless confrontation with an ex-mistress and her family, and that leads to a killing. Meursault is taken to prison, where he contemplates his actions, his fate and his place in the world.
Camus doesn't explain Meursault. He is just indifference personified. Until a late encounter with a visiting priest maybe allows some hot light and understanding to penetrate Meursault's coolly reflective surfaces.
Writer and director François Ozon (In The House, Swimming Pool, 8 Women) doesn't take the easy or obvious routes in his adaptation of the novel. His Meursault is very nearly as impervious at the end of the film as he was at the beginning, distractedly attending his mother's funeral without any apparent sadness or grief. Ozon doesn't even really offer Meursault up as some simple exemplar of oblivious colonial cruelty. But he does enough - just as Camus did - to show us that there is something there, behind Meursault's eyes. We just need to find the words to name it.
Ozon's adaptation also leans hard into the theatricality of the French trial system, so that the second part of The Stranger plays out as a near comedy of absurdities, with redundant conventions running into the passivity of a prisoner who has nothing to hide and no motives to offer.
The Stranger adds a few flourishes and speculations to the story, but they sit easily within the script - and, for all I know, they could also be buried in Camus' text, in places that only an academic or a native French speaker could find them.
In the leads, Benjamin Voisin (The Quiet Son) is extraordinary as Meursault, making this shadow of a man credible and fully present in the picture - and then letting the rage fly in one brief, unforgettable display. Next to Voisin, Rebecca Marder is perfect as the luckless Marie, Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall appears in the pivotal role of the jail-house priest. And the veteran Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) contributes a cameo as Meursault's appalling neighbour Salamano.
The Stranger is also one of the most beautifully photographed films I've seen in years. The cinematography - in gorgeous, woozy, heat-struck, black and white - is by Manuel Dacosse (Evolution). The framing is simple and austere, and Ozon doesn't ask for a movement of the camera unless it has a clearly defined purpose. You'd almost call The Stranger languidly paced, if the story it was laying out wasn't so damned engrossing and giddily paradoxical.
Ozon's The Stranger is an exceptional piece of work. It shifts the heart and the spirit of the book into a new medium with intelligence and artistry.
And if you think I was being fatuous and disrespectful by starting this review with a mention of The Cure and Killing an Arab, then you're really going to want to stay for the credits.
The Stranger is in cinemas now. Killing an Arab was the very first single by The Cure. It appears on Boys Don't Cry, or any Greatest Hits compilation.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The STranger is now playing at Light House Cinema!