The Stranger

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

THE STRANGER   ***

François Ozon

2025

IDEA:  In late-1930s Algiers, a Frenchman dispassionately murders an Arab man and is put on trial.

BLURB:  Ozon directs his adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger with an icy remoteness verging on sterility. Everything is starchy and obstinate and clinically pristine, from the sun-blasted whites of Manu Dacosse’s B&W cinematography to Benjamin Voisin’s impassive, statuesque figure. In the first half of the film, this affect can be fairly stifling, and perhaps counterintuitive; there are moments when Voisin’s perfectly manicured Meursault is photographed like a matinee idol in a perfume ad rather than an existential enigma (granted, there may be some overlap). But the remove that feels much like lifelessness becomes, appropriately, more charged in the second half. In the pivotal killing that cleaves The Stranger in two, Ozon adds a queer subtext that reframes the story in compelling ways. Cornering the recumbent Arab, Meursault looks at the man's exposed armpit in a POV shot before he is blinded by the glare of his phallic knife in another; the scene links Meursault to a repressed homoeroticism that is metonymically doubled by his country’s repression of the ethnic Other. Does Meursault have an unconscious desire and/or empathy for the Arab, seeing in his social marginalization a mirror of his own “strangeness,” and thus reaffirming the absurdity of the colonial apparatus? Ozon makes this a possibility, and if it potentially undercuts some of the stoic apathy in Camus, it offers new avenues for reading a character and a story that have been exhaustively pored over. This version of The Stranger still ends up in the embrace of the world’s gentle indifference, anyway, and then, in a surprising revisionist coda, at the site where that indifference is most soberingly evident.