The legacy of Camus, or we are all foreigners

If there are films that surprise, mobilize, and ultimately enchant us through their thematic and expressive solitude, François Ozon's 'The Stranger' (in cinemas from Thursday, the 12th) is certainly one of them. Adapted from Albert Camus's 1913-1960 novel, it possesses the obsession and obstinacy of a true cultural UFO. It makes no apologies and seeks no justifications for bringing the existential impasses and philosophical doubts of a 1942 book into our current reality. Any portrait of the central character, Mersault—the man whose mother died and who is to be tried for killing another man—faces a descriptive barrier: his existence of negation, or rather, of resistance to any involvement with social rules. He is not a political rebel, but a being who carries and endures the absurdity Camus recognized in the human condition. Benjamin Voisin's performance as Mersault is the fundamental dramatic component that makes the film function as a methodical exercise in living with that absurdity. Ozon's film, set in French Algeria, avoids nostalgic or ideological codification, instead presenting a colonial environment in unstable equilibrium between bonhomie and violence. Filmed in luminous black and white, the movie retains the density of an ancestral object, reminding us that while we contemplate the wounds of a past time, the existential melody emanating from it belongs to our present.