L’étranger

Camus’ classic existentialist novel is brought dramatically alive by François Ozon. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) is a Frenchman in Algiers; circumstances lead him to kill an Arab man. But it is his personality – his indifference to people and their values – that goes on trial.

What is the meaning of loving or killing, living or dying? Albert Camus’ famous 1942 novel asked these big questions through the tale of Meursault, led by chance and circumstance to an act of murder in Algiers. Jailed and brought to trial, he is presented as an immoral criminal – when, in his own mind, he’s simply a person of few words and undemonstrative emotions, indifferent to the beliefs of others.

A scrupulously faithful adaptation, Ozon’s film also allows itself the liberty of contemporary hindsight in its sidelong glimpses into 1930s Algerian culture, and in the addition of a new character: the deceased Arab man’s grieving sister. One of Camus’ major influences was American hardboiled crime fiction; Ozon evokes this via Manu Dacosse’s lush black and white cinematography. Like many an anti-hero in film noir, Meursault is an ordinary guy who finds himself trapped by appearances and condemned by society’s rigid assumptions about ‘normal’ behaviour. Ozon has long been the poet of everyday life and the forces that can unravel it; L’étranger proves to be his perfect vehicle.

– Adrian Martin

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