Review: A new take on Camus' 'The Stranger' by a veteran French stylist digs unto the unspoken

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It’s the same sun beating down on us all, Albert Camus memorably conveyed in his oft-debated 1942 novel “The Stranger,” it’s just the individual temperatures that vary.Now French director Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.That context starts with archival footage of French-colonized Algeria in the 1930s, the visuals speaking to both a humming aura of activity and the reality of who’s indigenous and who’s not.

Ozon sticks to black-and-white when he takes over and in much the way that eschewing color imbued a chilly, otherworldly elegance to Netflix’s recent “Ripley” (Camus-influenced), Ozon’s choice of hot monochrome to supplant cool prose puts the splendidly shot “Stranger” on a luscious footing.(Manu Dacosse is the DP.) All the better to be entranced by beautiful cipher Meursault (a well-cast Benjamin Voisin), a clerk in Algiers whose nearly every spoken response is some version of “Nothing matters.”That means he stoically tolerates the teary rituals surrounding his mother’s funeral in the beginning, then jumps right into a sexy fling with Marie (Rebecca Marder), whose marriage entreaties get the same impassive reaction.

He seems unconcerned that his bilious old neighbor (Denis Lavant) abuses his dog then wants sympathy when it flees.But it’s Meursault’s blithe friendship with sleazy Raymond (Pierre Lottin) — who beats his Arabic girlfriend Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) — that leads to a change in his one-thing-after-another approach to life.On a beach one Sunday at Raymond’s invitation, alone and in the throes of heatstroke, Meursault shoots a young Arab man who’s been following them, an ...