There is a chameleonic quality for François ozone; Unlike many author, He doesn’t just do about the same movie in different features. The cool, voyeuristic gaze of Charlotte Rampling in the psychose-eczersual thriller “Swimming Pool” is nothing like Catherine Denueve-led musical “8 Women”, just like the slippery, nesting dock “in the house” is a world away from the camp and kinky erotic thriller “The double lover.”
Merging his work is a non-assessing curiosity about socially consulting behavior and a feeling to capture the body heat of sexuality. By bringing Albert Camus’ absurdist 1942 novella ”The stranger“To the screen, Ozone utilizes a embodied, erotic side of the story, which is a pretty flex given that the book is known for having a protagonist so independent that it costs him everything.
Which does not say that this is a subversive Rewrite the text. The most important changes mean that individual humanity and the political turmoil for the native Algerian characters, described by the book’s first personal story, are uniformly as “the Arabs.” Save because one of these roles is one of these roles, Ozon’s script is loyal to lifting most lines in the Verbatim dialogue. Not because the quiet protagonist has much to say: “I don’t know” is his favorite response.
As camus, the main character, meursault (Benjamin Voisin from “Summer of ’85”) is a French-Algerian living in Algeria during the Indiga era, a code introduced by French colonial rule that gave the domestic population inferior legal status and harsher punishment. Ozone quickly conveys the underlying conflict with an establishment shot of graffiti that reads “Algerian liberation front” and then another of activists who advocate for the French language.
This is not the type of struggle that Meursault is likely to worry about. He is a neat containing presence and shows no reaction to opening a telegram that reads: “Mother death, funeral tomorrow.” Filmed in Lush, Bressonian black and white by the director of photography Manuel Dacosse, Voisin commands the camera’s gaze, even when his own remains opaque. He smokes like a chimney, sweeping butt after butt to rose brims before stumping them with more energy than he will use up to his next cigarette. His hair (sometimes licked back, sometimes with a driveway that is loose) is the most dynamic aspect of his persona. Shaving is also a ritual. He can on a capacity of life’s routines, it is on the arena for social performance that he – a budding Bartleby – would prefer not to.
Meursault is still traveling through the sweaty, stultuous heat to the rest home where his mother passed away and removes the necessary death duties, albeit without losing a tear. The next day, at the baths in his hometown, he encounters a young typist whom he used to know the name Marie (Rebecca Marder). The attraction is immediate. They dive into the water and swim to a float where he rests his head on her body and they lie, lazy confused, in a state of sun-drunk almost nudity. After all, sex and death are twins.
When she is dressed, she notices her black bracelet and offers condolences. He does not miss a rate before taking her to the cinema. They fall into a relationship. And in this part of its life, the passion burns brightly. Closer to the home, people’s feelings are steadfast. Meursault shares its multi -family house with neighbors who include a shameful old man Salamano (Denis Lavant), prone to screaming and beating the dog he loves more than anything. Then there is Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) whose violent relationship with his girlfriend, Djemila, starts the events that will define “the stranger.”
The question of why our protagonist agrees to help Raymond in this system is given room to delay – is it because Raymond buys him with food and drink? Is it because “Arabs” “are not counted”? Psychological motives are less than the sequence of causal events in the anesthetized atmosphere of “The Stranger” and instead the mystery is in its own terms.
Meursault is anything but rash. When he is asked to do something, he pauses to think. He is comfortable saying no. Still, he says yes when Raymond asks him to write Djemila a letter that attracts her to his apartment, where he plans to administer punishment. The two get closer and Meursault – without particularly liking the man – is drawn into a rivalry between the viral racial Raymond and Djemila’s brother and friends, who persecute revenge in her name.
Camus narrow novel is married to Meursault’s point of view and he is framed as a man who is finally condemned by his failure to perform grief appropriately, with the broader social consequences of his character left to the reader to unpack. Ozone (with a family history that leads back to the French colonial Algeria) makes some of it unpacking so the character is subtle again, with the social role he chooses to occupy meaning as much as the consequences of his scrubbing expression.
The early presentation of film Is as elegant and charged as a cat on a telephone wire. Crisp black and white pictures of a very photogenic, very strange man made by Kuwaitic musician Fatima al Qadiri’s eerie music, and even if you have not read the book, the feeling is not to end well. However, the period’s recreation of the algae of the 30s is pushed with elegance, and there is a fetishist attention to the beauty of the faces, places and things. At the same time, Voisin gives a cerebral performance of a man who occupies and contributes to an exciting tactile space while his antennas are adapted to another kingdom completely.
The state of stranger that permeates and infuses Camus prose, the missing ingredient here and, without it, cut Meursault a completely different figure – less smooth in ennui and more intentionally nihilistic. As Ozone has it, he is an attractive and vital alone whose impulsive act of violence is preceded by a moment of erotic transmission. Its aftermath puts him in a legal system that, according to his lawyer, would not wrong him for what he did to an Arabs, but his previous failure to cry at his mother’s funeral? Criminal.
Ozone manages to drum up at a hard atmosphere infused by expectations of white supremacy and neurotypicality and – moment by moment – there are details to party on. Swann Arlaud from “Anatomy of a case” shows up as a priest who unlocks more words in ten minutes than Mersault has spoken in the result of the film. However, this character development does not land, and Mersault is becoming more hazy and disappears in a cloud of abstraction in the third act.
The level of crafts that are available when it comes to creating the atmosphere is transfixing and the film acts as a fever dream that sat in the tail of French colonial rule. But as an explicit adaptation of the book through a mind in the process of birth existentialism, it does not really have the necessary fashion or – I dare say it – strange.
Rating: B-
“The Stranger” premiered at 2025 Venice Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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