“The Stranger”: Arctic in Algiers

It was because of the sun. Also who The stranger from Albert Camus If you haven’t read it, you might know this sentence. He is supposed to explain a murder committed at midday, when the sun was at its highest, on a beach near Algiers. A Frenchman, his name is Meursault, shoots an Arab who blinds him with the blade of his knife. He fires a fatal shot, waits a moment and then shoots the corpse four more times. Every shot, Camus wrote, was a blow with which Meursault “hammered at the gate of misfortune.” But Camus was not at all interested in the murder in his legendary 1942 novel. There is murder every day. In the summer of 1939, when Camus was still a reporter for the Franco-Algerian daily newspaper Alger republicain There were three murder trials in Algiers alone in which the sun and alcohol played a role. The scandal of the novel is the murderer’s callousness. The man has no motive and no explanation for his actions. He shows no remorse, does not ask for forgiveness and did not cry when his mother died. On the afternoon of her funeral, he went swimming with his girlfriend and went to the cinema. The French justice system sentenced him to death primarily for his indifference.

Sea, light and love are the only valid currency

Who The stranger filmed, has to find images for the emotional freezing level of the novel, in which a young man does not understand and does not want to understand the civilizational standards of the society in which he lives. Camus portrays him similarly to himself in his autobiographical novel The first human as a person from the Mediterranean, spared from Western socialization, who is driven out of the paradise by the accidental murder on the beach, in which the sea, the bright light of the south and physical love are the only valid currency. For him, Christian morality and sentimentality, professional advancement and ambition are a foreign currency imported from Paris. Why Meursault so coldly rejects all the demands that a modern society places on the inner lives of its members remains unexplained in the novel. He only coldly counters all demands from the bourgeois currency area with the sentence: “That has no meaning.” For the Nietzsche reader Camus, the stranger was a heroic fatalist who lived by the Sisyphus motto: “There is no fate that cannot be overcome by contempt.”

Luchino Visconti has The stranger Filmed in color in 1967 with Marcello Mastroianni as the overwhelmed Latin lover Meursault, without having a convincing idea for the latest Parisian cool and the absurd attitude to life of the novel. To be on the safe side, the most important passages of the book were simply read out page by page in voiceover according to the instructions of the widow Francine Camus.

Stereotypes of petty-bourgeois colonial society

François Ozon’s new adaptation is a far more ambitious film because it resists the temptation to retroactively bring the inexplicable to an acceptable human temperature in order to soften the novel’s harsh strangeness. Its historicizing black and white look provides cooling, underlining the existentialist emergency with minimalist austerity and strong light and shadow contrasts. The strict typification of the figures hardly creates any modern-day warmth. Above all, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) is of ice-cold beauty, as the chain-smoking archangel of existentialism moves through the colonial world to the spherical sounds of Fatima Al Qadiri Algiers walks without batting an eye. The secondary characters, the pompous neighbor who involves the stranger in his dispute with the Arabs, the lonely old man who lives in a fighting symbiosis with his mangy dog, the beautiful Marie (Rebecca Marder), who loves the stranger and wants to marry him, are tabloid stereotypes of the sunken petty-bourgeois French colonial society of the interwar period.

A particular challenge is the time and place of the novel’s plot. The Arab population remained an anonymous mass of silent extras in the classic novel, which was set against a colonial background. In Camus, the Arab who was shot had neither a face nor a name, which prompted the Algerian author Kamel Daoud to write a counter-novel from the perspective of the Arab victim in 2014 (The Meursault case – a rebuttal). Albert Camus, the son of an almost mute, illiterate cleaning lady from the poor district of Algiers, who was born in 1913, generally only gave his female characters very limited speaking time.

Careful correction of the blank spaces

The film tries to carefully fill these gaps without making brutal post-colonial and post-patriarchal corrections to the work, which is over eighty years old. Due to the currently tense French-Algerian relations, the film was shot in Tangier, but the Algerian colonial period is remembered through historical footage from the time of the struggle for independence. “Algerie Front de la liberté” can be read in large letters on an old stone wall. This slogan was used to fight for Algeria’s independence in the 1930s, and Camus doesn’t mention it. Also added is a short, sensitive conversation between the murdered man’s Arab sister and Marie, the stranger’s French friend, which would be unthinkable with Camus. The last pictures demonstratively show the grave of the murdered Arab, on the tombstone is his newly invented name: Moussa Hamdani. Camus’ now 80-year-old daughter Catherine Camus, who is allowed to rule her father’s work until 2030, has apparently allowed this much gentle updating.

The surprisingly talkative ending of the young murderer, who doesn’t know why he murdered, strictly adheres to the novel’s guidelines, which provide for a biblical finale: a priest visits the condemned man on death row. But the sermon is delivered by the murderer, who has been almost silent until now and can suddenly speak like a state actor. A woman’s hair, he thunders, is worth more than the priest’s god, whom he calls a living dead man. It is Camus’ own gospel of the Mediterranean, sun and sensuality that is being presented. The gentlemen cannot agree and the guards break them apart. And because Camus doesn’t want to send the hero to the scaffold completely unconsoled for his sublime senselessness, he lets him take one last look at the sky on his last night, which is suddenly “full of signs and wonders” as on Christmas night. “For the first time,” as the legendary phrase goes, the disbelieving savage opens himself up to “the tender indifference of the world.” Even with Ozon, the strange comfort of the little word “tender” in the voiceover gently descends on the death row candidate like a snowflake from the cold cosmos. Maybe all is not lost after all.