“The Stranger” by François Ozon, the review by Paolo Mereghetti

THEOR FOREIGN
Type; Existential-psychoanalytic drama
Director: by François Ozon, With Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant, Swann Arlaud, Christophe Malavoy, Nicolas Vaude

Visconti’s semi-failure did not scare Ozon who he wanted to compete with again The stranger by Camuspassing the test – let’s say it straight away – of having been able to find the right balance between the flow of thoughts of the book version and the significant silences of the cinematographic one.

«Je ne sais pas» Meursault continues to repeat, or “I don’t know”, because this thirty-year-old in Algiers in 1938 feels like a “foreigner” among humans: he doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, he doesn’t respect mourning by going to see a comedy at the cinema and bringing home a former colleague. And when the neighbor asks him to help him in a women’s affair, he gets dragged into a revenge that will cost him dearly.

With his novel, Camus wanted to give voice to the fatigue of being in the world: I don’t know if today that “strangeness” still has justifications (there are other reasons for our existential woes, it seems to me) but Ozon, also the only screenwriter, pushes us to stop time and face the meaning of our actions, of our anxieties, of our doubts. And the resignation with which Meursault faces life and accepts the sentence of the trial undoubtedly strikes a chord.

For those who want to deal with the most secret discomfort.