Translators have long argued over whether to present Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, a key text of mid-20th century ennui, as “The Outsider” or “The Stranger”. The former better gets across the protagonist’s emotional isolation. The latter is, in linguistic terms, something of a false friend. Nonetheless, it has remained The Stranger on most anglophone bookshelves (not to mention in The Cure’s Killing an Arab) and retains that title for the Irish release of François Ozon’s eerily beautiful, psychologically acute adaptation.
[ Four stories that Albert Camus might choose to tell if he were alive todayOpens in new window ]
Maybe that is wise. With some subtlety, Ozon, a film-maker of staggering versatility, points up the colonial overtones in Camus’s story. We begin with a newsreel simplistically selling Algiers to the French public. When Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), the famously unknowable anti-hero, takes Marie (Rebecca Marder), his misused girlfriend, to the cinema – they watch an undemanding comedy starring the bumbling Fernandel – we spot a sign in the foyer saying “no indigenes allowed”. Eventually arrested for murdering an Arab, he soon learns that the authorities regard this as a lesser crime than killing a Frenchman. Meursault really is a stranger to the indigenous population. When he tells an indigene “home is here”, she merely laughs.
In book and film, the killing is a key turning point. To that point Ozon’s project, though touched with adjacent misery, represents a desirable sort of existence. Manuel Dacosse’s gorgeous monochrome cinematography allows the sun to bleach out the exterior backgrounds. An afternoon at the beach presents something close to an idyll. Fatima Al Qadiri’s sweeping score – mixing lush orchestrations with Arabic influences – risks lulling us into complacent disregard.
One might reasonably argue it is too beautiful. This is, after all, a tale of existential angst that ends in a bleak accommodation with annihilation. But Ozon appears to be selling that aspect of the film as an illusion. It is all surface glamour, but, as any perusal of the familiar story confirms – a mother’s death, a whipped dog, an eventual killing – universal horror is waiting to break through the social and psychological carapace.
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The second half of the picture is (no pun intended) more of a trial. Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect. And, yes, a certain 1979 debut single does appear under the closing credits.
In cinemas from Friday, April 10th
