François Ozon adapts Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), delicately recreating 1950s Algeria with beautiful black-and-white cinematography. The sun oppressed beach presented by Camus—that unsettling world, a space of both reality and metaphor—is resurrected on screen through Ozon’s elegant mise-en-scène. It is on that very beach that the protagonist, Meursault, pulls the trigger on a young Arab man for no clear reason. The young star of French cinema, Benjamin Voisin, perfectly embodies the ‘stranger’ Meursault, who acts without volition and perceives his own actions as if they were someone else’s. Instead of Camus’ famous opening sentence, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know,” Ozon’s striking adaptation begins with the protagonist’s monologue, “I killed an Arab,” leading the audience back to the dark French colonial period. It was an era when the act of not shedding tears at one’s mother’s funeral was considered a greater sin than murdering an Arab. Ozon gazes coldly at that world of contradictory morality, illuminating the essence of such ‘absurdity’ from his own perspective.
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