*****
The word existential is being reduced in recent times. Politicians in particular use it to imply urgency caused by the threat of disappearance,… ‘extinction’, would suit their meaning better, but not their desire to sound intellectual.
When Camus wrote L’Etranger, the short novel on which this film is tightly based, he was a follower of the philosophy of existentialism expounded in particular by Jean Paul Sartre. In the era of declining religious faith, existentialists cast doubt on accepted codes of moral behaviour. Traditional guidelines of moral comfort, such as the Bible, by which we had developed our sense of meaning, of right and wrong, were based on such shabby and erroneous foundations as to be spurious. Man now had to find his own way. He was alone. Decisions were his. Life had no definable purpose, and nothing beyond. It’s a gloomy thought, brilliantly evoked by Benjamin Voisin’s Meursault in his repeated deadpan responses to most of the action and conversation that he encounters in Francois Ozon’s 2025 version of L’Etranger (The Stranger).
Fittingly, the film is in black and white, with all the shades in between, but no gloss, no colour, despite the strikingly handsome, chiselled looks of the central character, and the beauty of his girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder).
Meursault seems to have prospects; a beautiful and devoted girlfriend, a steady job, a boss who asks him whether he’d like to work at the new offices in Paris…..but nothing fills him with anything like enthusiasm. Marie tells him that she loves him. He questions the meaning, and the existence of love. She would like to marry him. He’s okay about that, but tells her that he would marry any other suitable girl who asked him. And he’s happy, perhaps ‘contented’ is the better word, living and working where he is, a long way from Paris.
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know,” is the famous opening of Camus’ novel. Ozon does not give us exactly those sentences, but he presents us with the telegram, and Meursault’s virtually silent trip across country to his mother’s funeral, where he sits through a macabre, bizarre vigil by his mother’s coffin, adjacent to her cadaverous but still surviving colleagues from the old people’s home. The taciturn, expressionless Meursault needs no words to convey to us his belief in the pointless inevitability of events. As a representation of the episode in Camus’ classic, this is brilliantly done.
The least clear and most perplexing moment in the story, book and film, is the key point – Meursault’s brutal killing of the Arab on the beach. The first shot defies explanation. The subsequent four shots into the Arab youth’s dead body appal us. Meursault tells a disbelieving courtroom that the intense heat and light from the sun caused it.
The courtroom is itself a metaphor for the way that we are judged, in all our responses, throughout our life. Social media virtue-signalling is a by-product of this phenomenon. There are accepted responses, and unaccepted ones. If you present unaccepted behaviour, you are widely pillaged, cancelled even. Accepted responses are largely based on a belief system and moral code that Meursault has rejected. He does not buy in to conventional societal beliefs. Into the courtroom witnesses are called from events that we have evidenced earlier in the story, many from the old people’s home who saw the ungrieving son at his mother’s funeral. Their testimony, though not designed to condemn or even to criticise him, demonstrates how Meursault’s behaviour, his responses to people, to events, to grief, to love, just do not fit in. He is an outsider. Perhaps The Outsider, in so far as he is the most extreme version that literature has ever produced.
Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger) another cult figure, from a novel written nine years after the publication of Camus’ L’Etranger, comes to mind. Holden’s key word was ‘phoney’. He hated the way that people responded insincerely, but according to accepted moral codes. But Holden did not take it to the same extreme as Meursault.
As he awaits his fate, his execution, in the solitary cell, Meursault is visited by a priest, the embodiment of the collective moral code by which we live, and have lived forever. Meursault, at last, loses his cool, and physically grapples with the priest, yelling at him that he, the priest, knows too, that his own religious doctrine is false, that life is meaningless and then ends.
There is no point, Meursault tells him. No point in anything. The paradox is that, if Meursault is right, there is no point to the film. But that is too hard to believe.
