Venice Film Festival 2025, Review movie L'Étranger - The Stranger

It's not always easy to discern between what should be said and the option to lie. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) doesn't pose himself such questions, because he always opts for the truth: "Why lie?" he asks his girlfriend Marie Cardona (Rebecca Marder), whom he meets on the beach the day after attending his mother's funeral.

Meursault always responds with coldness, as if disinterested in worldly matters, floating mid-air with a superiority that won't lead him far. L'Étranger (The Stranger) by François Ozon is based on Albert Camus' eponymous novel, an emblem of literary existentialism: set in Algiers in 1938, when the death penalty was in force. Meursault seems almost to challenge it while pursuing his indifference, immune to feelings. At his mother's funeral, he doesn't cry, and when he kills a man on the beach with five gunshots, during the trial his emotional detachment becomes an aggravating factor in the accusations. "At the funeral he didn't cry," testifies the director of the nursing home where his mother had been living. 

Ozon's film might appear confined to an atavistic period, thanks also to the black and white cinematography: but it's more relevant than it seems, because it poses the question of whether guilt should be accepted rather than attempting to exonerate oneself. Meursault is rigorous: he prefers to endure the punishment because he is present in his life and in the actions he takes. In an era where everything is falsifiable through various artificial intelligences, he is the emblem of authenticity, from which one can never escape. When his pimp friend Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) asks him to write a letter to make a prostitute return, he accepts, because he sees no difference between acting and remaining static. 

Ozon treats the direction with the same harshness, composed of overhead shots or facial tracking. The death penalty that Meursault defies is a sentence from which he doesn't shy away, even though he hopes the government will grant him clemency. For this same consistency, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.