Benjamin Voisin in The Stranger

THE STRANGER
Directed by François Ozon
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

ALBERT Camus’ 1942 bestseller is a diatribe against a world that makes no sense. A response to the moral dislocation of war, of a sense that life has lost all purpose, it is the story of a murder and the protagonist’s lack of motive before the crime and lack of remorse after.

Tangiers under French rule is a city where the Imperial invaders think they are superior.

Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) works for a French company doing an undefined office job. We are not party to his back story. He is just one of those pen pushers that empires required – a nobody in terms of special talents, but someone who can be relied on: the regimented order of oppressive regimes were built by the talentless given authority, due to quirk of birth and skin colour.

Meursault is one of these minions European governments sent to Africa to stamp invoices and file receipts.

We meet him as he attends his mother’s funeral.

The heat has evaporated personality. He can barely mourn her and the burial process feels like a series of must-do steps to get the body in the ground, not a way for emotions to be processed.

He meets Marie (Rebecca Marder), but her love cannot thaw him – he remains silent, charmless, with the same soulless and dead eyes as Patricia Highsmith’s Mr Ripley.

Meursault’s neighbour Sintes (Pierre Lotin) is entangled with an Algerian girlfriend, who he assaults. It leads to the plot’s central axis, her brother’s murder.

Camus wrote this while France was occupied by Nazi Germany.

It is understandable in the midst of such evil, nihilism would emerge as a relevant and attractive philosophy. It’s a warning of how fascism debases humanity.

Director François Ozon creates a sense that is an older film. It is not just the monochrome print or the ragged soundtrack and background noise, nor the stilted performances (they are meant to be and grow on you). It is a clever homage to the period it is set in. It helps describe a mid-20th-century crisis of meaning, a fundamental crash of purpose to life caused by millions of murders.

The viewer is jolted back to the present day when the credits roll and The Cure’s song Killing An Arab, a homage to Camus, plays over the credits: a reminder of how influential this bestselling book (10 million copies in France alone) has been, and remains so.