The Stranger review – lustrously beautiful and superbly realised modern take on the Camus classic

François Ozon’s adaptation of the 1942 novella L’Etranger passionately honours the original text while bringing a contemporary perspective to its themes of empire and race A heatstricken reverie of violence and mystery unfolds in this film, a numb ecstasy of the inexplicable, as experienced by a sensitive white European under the unbearable noonday sun. Set in 1940s French Algeria (and filmed in Morocco), François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning. An archive reel introduces us briskly to Algiers and its casbah, with a hint of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko; then we are shown our antihero Meursault, remanded there on trial for the capital crime of murde