The Stranger

A filmmaker who could spin a seductive interpretation out of Bleak House, François Ozon definitely extracts all the juice from Albert Camus’ famous 1942 novella L'Étranger. The existential tale has been a holy text for angsty teenagers and Gitane-puffing sophisticates for generations. None of them will remember it being quite this horny. 

The Swimming Pool and Young and Beautiful director is a visual stylist and he amplifies the sensuality of Camus’ great antihero Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) in dazzling ways, with Manu Dacosse’s gorgeous monochrome lighting finding light and shade in colonial Algiers. If there’s a better-looking film this year, it’ll be a thing to behold. 

Played with an inscrutable kind of magnetism by Ozon’s Summer of 85 lead Voisin, Mersault is a clerk, a cog in the machine of French colonialism – a man for whom life is a series of motions to go through and moral and emotional judgments are meaningless. He makes little distinction between his scummy pimp neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin), whose abuse of a young Arab woman (Hajar Bouzaouit) brings violence to his door, and the self-pitying dog-beater upstairs (Denis Lavant’s rumpled face telling a thousand stories). He makes no outward sign of grieving his mother’s death. He is, to the eyes of his countrymen, an unsettling enigma.  

If there’s a better-looking film this year, it’ll be a thing to behold

His affair with beautiful young typist Marie (Rebecca Marder) is expanded from the book, injecting life before things get ripped off their axis when he shoots a young Arab man in cold blood after a lazy day on the beach. (The Cure’s Killing An Arab gets an on-the-nose play over the end credits). 

Voisin and Marder have real star quality, framed in silvery monochromes in the North African glare. The Mediterranean sun dapples their skin as they lazily entwine on a bathing platform. She hopes that love will follow, but he shrugs it off. Ozon offers a whisper of romance, but this isn’t Casablanca. Instead, the second half shifts into the judicial realm to dig deeper into the soul of this seemingly callous man. The matter-of-fact rattle of Camus’ prose is replicated via the introduction of a Mersault voiceover. Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri’s (Atlantics) hypnotic score brings an eerie, alien quality to remind us whose world he’s living in. 

The best scenes unfold with Mersault behind bars, a single haggard Frenchman in a world of Arabs, and in court, where Swann Arlaud’s judge gives the unrepentant man every opportunity to swerve his punishment – all of which he rejects. A beautiful-ugly parable of colonialism, this is one of Ozon’s best.

In UK and Ireland cinemas on Fri, April 10.