Monday Night Cinema

The Stranger

(L'étranger)

The superb new film from multi award-winning writer/director François Ozon (Summer of 85, 8 Women, Frantz, The Crime is Mine), The Stranger is a gripping adaptation of Albert Camus’ landmark novella about a detached young expatriate under trial for murder in French-colonised Algeria.

Summer, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, Lost Illusions), a quiet and unassuming clerk in his early thirties, attends his mother’s funeral. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a colleague randomly encountered at the local baths, and quickly slips back into routine. However, daily life is soon disrupted by his volatile neighbour (Pierre Lottin, My Brother’s Band), who draws Meursault into an altercation involving an ex-lover. And then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable event occurs on a beach, one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought to question…

Visually resplendent with sensuous black-and-white images, Ozon’s elegant and masterfully realised film shines a contemporary lens on Camus' classic tale of dissociation and morality, capturing the beauty and heat of a charged society on the boil. Both impactful and mysterious, The Stranger is must-see French cinema of the highest order.