The poster for The Stranger, FOZ – Gaumont/Prod.DB/Alamy, under Fair Use.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is the concluding sentence of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1942 essay arguing that the way to confront the absurdity of life is to embrace it with happiness and thus become an absurd hero. François Ozon’s recent adaptation of Camus’s 1942 novella The Stranger presents the viewer with Meursault, a French Algerian settler played by Benjamin Voisin, who encounters the absurd life not with happiness but with indifference. He recognizes but cannot embrace the absurdity of the world around him. The film’s minimalism captures the emptiness of indifference, even when Meursault directs it toward an absurd world.
This emptiness is best expressed early in the film, during the funeral proceedings for Meursault’s mother. The vigil the night before the funeral is treated, both by Meursault and by Ozon, as an empty proceeding. The performance of Meursault’s apparent care is accentuated by the artificiality of the light brightening the scene. The mourners, varying in their sadness, are freed from the vigil by sunlight streaking through a moucharaby, a traditional Arabic window containing intricate woodworking patterns. In The Stranger, however, the sun is not always redemptive.
The film opens with a French-language travel documentary announcing Algeria as the “smooth blend of Occident and Orient.” This choice announces the film as keenly aware of its own relationship to orientalism, the construction of Middle Eastern or Asian cultures as othered. The Stranger, as a novella and film, is deeply steeped in the French colonization of Algeria. However, awareness and concern do not imply nuance. Ozon’s film nods toward its obvious colonial implications without ever actually saying anything about them. It is limited in its capacity to address these implications by its own purpose: to depict the mind of one of France’s colonists. This limitation appears in the film’s choice to subtitle Arab characters for the audience only when they are speaking French. The film is aware that it should say something about orientalism—it wants its viewers to know it is aware of that—but given its structure and story, it can’t. Orientalism in the works of Camus is a topic worthy of further exploration, one that the film and this review can only begin to explore.
Meursault’s disregard for his colonial position and his mother’s funeral is not mirrored by a lack of care in Ozon’s directing. Ozon makes purposeful choices in framing Meursault against a crucifix and the sun. His face is turned away from the crucifix while it looms in the background, symbolizing his rejection of Christianity and evoking Ingmar Bergman’s framing in Winter Light of another morally lost main character. In The Stranger’s pivotal beach scene, familiar to anyone who has read the novella, the sun, taking on new significance, is framed in exactly the opposite way as it had been in the funeral scene, now occupying the entirety of Meursault’s vision. The few choices Ozon makes that draw attention to the work as subjective, created according to the whims of the director, justify their own existence by furthering the existential themes through a demonstration of Meursault’s godless, amoral world.
The Stranger is paced meditatively, but effective editing ensures that the audience never feels its length. The viewer is given time to sit with the choices Meursault makes and the moral emptiness he feels. The presentation of absurdity could have grown stale; I, for one, would not personally enjoy watching someone push a boulder up a mountain for two hours. However, Ozon and the film’s editor, Clément Selitzki, present the absurd world Meursault lives in with sufficient variety and care to sustain audience attention.
The film’s craft leaves nothing to be desired. Its black-and-white cinematography is without fault. The audience receives a view of the film’s world without interruption from color or visual noise. A sparse visual language highlights the choices made by Meursault (and Ozon). A lack of flash and spectacle leaves space for the viewer to fully experience Meursault’s emptiness. It is a contrast to the maximalism of the modern commercial film, such as Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, which reveals an emptiness of characterization rather than an emptiness in the life of a particular character.
Meursault refuses happiness. He recognizes the absurdity of the world around him and chooses to disengage from it. The film, like the novella, is effective in its demonstration of a justice system without justice, a friendship without friends, and a religion without a god. It is equally effective at demonstrating the passion felt between Meursault and his love interest Marie, played by Rebecca Marder. When she asks him, “Do you love me?”, he replies, “That means nothing. I don’t think so.” Love, too, can be absurd but that does not necessarily reduce it to meaning nothing. Meursault fails in his duty to become an absurd hero not because he lacks an awareness of the absurdity of life but because he lacks heroism. He does not confront the world with passion. When passion confronts him, he spurns it.
One cannot come out of The Stranger imagining Meursault happy. Instead, given Voisin’s conventional good looks, the audience is forced to imagine Meursault hot. That we cannot imagine him happy doesn’t mean that one cannot imagine themselves happy, however. The viewer is presented with a vision of the world as cold and cruel, yet, they are shown that indifference is not the answer to an absurd world. The film leaves the viewer, much like Meursault, existentially empty. It puts the viewer at the bottom of a very large hill, with their load slightly heavier, and asks them to climb back up, happily.