François Ozon adapts Albert Camus's perennial work of the same name, set in the French colonial Algeria in the 1940s. It concerns a senseless murder of a young Arab man by an emotionally stunted French national, and the subsequent murder trial and conviction.
Ozon prefaces the film with the newsreel footage of Algeria under French colonialism, and how the Algerians are treated like second class citizens in their own country - excluded from restaurants, movie theaters, shops and public transports. Not in so many words, Ozon is suggesting that Meursault's ennui and senseless actions are deeply rooted in colonialism and injustices that were out in the open for everyone to see.
Presented in crisp black and white, the film tells about a low level company clerk, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, seen in Ozon's Summer of 85') living in French occupied Algiers. He leads an uneventful, yet comfortable life - swimming at the beach, going to the movies and spending quiet time in his apartment, that is when he's allowed to- His rowdy neighbors Raymond (Pierre Lottin), a pimp who regularly beats his Algerian girlfriend, and an old timer Salamano (Denis Lavant) who has a love/hate relationship with his aging, barking dog.
The news of his mother's death at an old folks' rest home makes Meursault travel outside the city in sweltering heat. He is greeted by the staff of the facility, who are shocked by his dispassionate display of grief. He doesn't seem to be in mourning or sad. He refuses to look at the body, and leaves as soon as the funeral is over.
Back in Algiers, Meursault starts seeing Marie (Rebecca Marder), an old acquaintance who finds him attractive. After a while, she asks him if he loves her. He doesn't know. But she is not giving up. She wants to marry him, even though she finds his resigned attitude towards life a bit off-putting, to say the least. She thinks she can fix him.
Raymond complains that his Arab girlfriend's brother is after him and that he wants Meursault to 'back him up'. Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to his friend's cabin by the beach. But the Arab men follow them. Raymond is hurt during scuffle with them. With Raymond's gun, Meursault tracks Raymond's girlfriend's brother and shoots him on the beach.
The images by Manuel Dacosse (Evolution, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) are striking and memorable in their high contrast monochrome. The scene of a guillotine on the top of the hill has a feel of surrealist master Luís Buñuel's work and the sun-kissed, enigmatic images of Algiers resemble the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Voisin does a terrific job embodying an empty man who swears off the existence of god and embraces life's meaninglessness. A great supporting cast includes Lavant, Marder and Swann Arlaud (hot lawyer from Anatomy of a Fall, plays a hot priest here).
The subtext to Ozon's very closely adapted The Stranger, based on the existentialist, absurdist classic, is that Meursault's self-imposed isolation and his atheistic world view are the symptoms of witnessing decades of inhumane colonialism and experiencing rootlessness, not as much by the German invasion of the greater Europe and WWII. His rootlessness is mentioned twice in the film - when Marie suggests that after they get married, they go back to France, he responds, 'but this is my home,' and when his boss at the firm gives him an opportunity to station him in their Paris office, he declines.
The Stranger subtly shows the entitlement of the occupiers living in a foreign land as if they are living in Paris and considering it as their home without a second thought. Some twenty years later, after The Stranger was written, with armed struggle against the French, Algeria finally earned their independence in 1962, ending more than a century of French Colonial rule. The film gives a deeper context of understanding Meursault's actions, based on France's racist colonial history.
