Movie review<\/h2>\n
So you want to make a film adaptation of a literary classic. What path do you take in tackling it?<\/p>\n
Perhaps, out of a well-intentioned reverence to the text, you hew as close as possible to the original writing, staging key scenes and lifting memorable dialogue already familiar to readers. Alternatively, perhaps you attempt to directly confront the source material, holding it up to the light to see what may emerge between the words on the page. Or, if you\u2019re director Fran\u00e7ois Ozon, the prolific, often provocative French filmmaker behind everything from \u201cSwimming Pool<\/a>\u201d and \u201cTime to Leave<\/a>\u201d to the recent \u201cThe Crime Is Mine<\/a>,\u201d and you\u2019re adapting Albert Camus\u2019 1942 novella \u201cThe Stranger,\u201d you say: Why not do both?<\/p>\n The result is a film that\u2019s both incredibly faithful to the acclaimed book and also quietly radical in how it expands on many of its existing ideas. It follows the same broad strokes of the story, centering on Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), who seemingly doesn\u2019t care about anything in the world as he goes from dealing with the loss of his mother to shockingly taking the life of a stranger in French-occupied Algeria in the 1930s. But it also proves new in ways that burrow into your subconscious. Yes, \u201cThe Stranger\u201d is about a man who is frighteningly passive about nearly everything around him as he merely drifts through his own life. However, Ozon\u2019s film is anything but lifeless. With each subtle yet significant addition, it proves cracklingly, urgently alive in a way most other literary adaptations could only dream of.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ozon\u2019s latest is a vibrant vision of casual yet disquietingly haunting historical nightmares. Shot in beautiful black and white by cinematographer Manu Dacosse, the monochrome visuals contain mesmerizing depths, and a growing menace. From the opening moments when we are shown archival footage of 1930s Algiers, it becomes clear Ozon is seeking to genuinely wrestle with the text, its place in history and what its late writer might not have seen.<\/p>\n Eerily chippy narration informs us of how the city of Algiers was once a \u201csmall, ancient town,\u201d though it is \u201cnow so much more!\u201d as \u201cFrance has opened it up.\u201d Now, it all seems more \u201cParisian,\u201d ensuring tourists are able to indulge in the beauty of the locale while not having to think about the Indigenous Algerians who remain a present part of the bustling city.\u00a0<\/p>\n The juxtaposition between the words and the images we\u2019re seeing sets the stage perfectly for our introduction to Meursault as he is led into jail. Though this is a film about him, it\u2019s also about the context he is swimming in and in which Camus was writing. Meursault\u2019s first words \u2014 \u201cI killed an Arab\u201d \u2014 are delivered without even a hint of remorse, lacking any acknowledgment of the humanity or personhood of who he killed. Ozon\u2019s film then becomes about putting this on trial and asking why it was that the book\u2019s protagonist is seemingly punished not for taking the life of another person, but for not sufficiently playing along with how he could get away with it. It confronts the dark absurdities of this process while finding small slivers of humanity that Camus himself may have overlooked.<\/p>\n