Director: François Ozon
Stars: Benjamin Voisin, Denis Lavant, Rebecca Marder
Another year, another picture from the prolific French sensualist François Ozon to either enjoy or endure. Ozon pictures are so regular that it’s tricky to keep up with them, and I’ll admit to missing as many as I catch, but of late the likes of Summer of ’85 and Peter Von Kant have served me well enough, so an opportunity to watch him grapple with Camus (bit of a curveball!) seemed hard to pass up.
His attempt at the existentialist’s seminal 1942 novella finds him operating in a disarmingly sincere mode, though the decision to shoot this, of all things, in monochrome is a slightly bizarre one. Ultimately that choice seems to come down to aesthetics. A short-hand, perhaps, to conjure some of the austerity and self-seriousness adopted by the story’s protagonist.
We’re in Algiers on the North African coast where the inscrutably emotionless Mersault (Benjamin Voisin) has just been thrown into jail for killing an Arab. Via flashback we chart the course of events that led to this. Much of the flare of Camus’ prose is shorn away, leaving us with the immaculate Voisin and his often unreadable face. Mersault takes leave from his office job upon receiving news that his mother – whom he sent to convalesce in the country – has died. His stoicism at her funeral is noticed by all. On returning he begins a fitful romance with Marie (Rebecca Marder), while becoming haphazardly associated with one of the neighbours in his apartment building; a crude and tempestuous pimp named Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Raymond has stirred up the aggression of ‘indigene’ Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) for mistreating his sister Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit). When Moussa confronts Raymond on the beach, Mersault is moved to action, but even he feels unsure of his motivations.
It takes an hour or so for the above drama to unfold as Ozon smoulders over Voisin’s Mersault, in and out of clothes, and the actor fits the part, evoking the likes of New Wave stalwarts Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo, reduced and whittled down to a svelte (if not entirely unsympathetic) enigma. Mersault isn’t a clear-cut monster. Indeed, The Stranger is partway about justifying his outsider philosophy, and asking us what if we do identify with him? Is his beauty enough to justify such an impassive stance on life? Mersault positions himself as dispassionate. He refuses to judge his elderly neighbour Salamano (Denis Lavant), for instance, even though the old man abuses his dog. When Raymond roughs up Djemila within earshot, he’s compassionless. But he’s not incapable of passion, as his sojourns of physical intimacy with Marie amply evidence. As empty as he seems – or would so like to seem – he has contradictions within him.
Immediately preceding his act of violence in the baking sun, Mersault hears the notion, “If you imagine evil you attract it”, from the split-open mouth of Raymond, no less. The Stranger suggests just that; a poison loosed into the air, so paradoxical is Mersault’s crime. The film is a ravishingly chic take on the material up to a point (something liable to irk a portion of the audience well-versed in the text), but Ozon loses some of his seductive hold over us once the tale switches to the courtroom. What previously felt steely in focus quickly becomes more formulaic, though that’s not wholly Ozon’s fault.
There are elements that jar. Voisin so successfully makes Mersault a conundrum that sudden bursts of first-person narration feel intimate in a way that the film has deliberately avoided. Similarly, the character is kept so consistently emotionless that a late outburst seems like a similarly shocking overreach. There is of course a wild irony in Mersault’s passion finally manifesting as a fiery articulation of his nihilistic philosophy, in direct challenge to a figure of religious salvation. Even a fantasy sequence in the third act feels like a pry too close to one who has been so thoroughly framed as unreachable.
Questions are provoked throughout, about racial privilege, the criminality of being remorseless, and whether capital punishment serves any purpose if the guilty party remains confoundingly passive and indifferent. Staging this story – even as a period piece – in our current climate feels loaded and deliberate. What is the justification for moral passivity in the face of atrocity?
Sometimes The Stranger feels too self-consciously stylised, like a movie we’d see characters watching in a movie, but the attempt – however messy – to contend with this slippery text is admirable, and the results, however uneven, make for a fascinating watch. The centre of it all is Voisin, piercing us with a gaze loaded with an oxymoron; an intense ambivalence. It’s eerie, but – disturbingly – not entirely alien either.
The Lost Highway Hotel 