El extranjero

Too literal and quite boring despite the good acting.

The silent action of meursault throughout most of the film is dull. Whereas the book is full of his inner life the film just stifles it.

Disappointing as this seems like an immature adaptation.

The filmography is quite beautiful. Overall this film had a dull dated feel.

An actor with the same expression for two hours and a constantly tense jaw. Throughout the entire two-hour movie, he barely says four lines. The acting is nonexistent and terrible. If the lead actor were good, the movie could have been very good. We were extremely bored at the cinema, almost ready to leave after an hour. It's not worth it unless you want to watch a guy smoking cigarettes nonstop for two hours, with the same haircut because the set designer forgot to change it. Awful.

The adaptation is very faithful to Camus's novel, with only a few minor deviations. It even reprises some verbatim passages at key moments in the story. It convincingly conveys Meursault's inner life, portrayed with great accuracy by Benjamin Voisin, all restraint and apathy, both unsympathetic and fascinating. Like the character of Marie, we are at once moved and repelled by him. He seems empty inside, falsely indifferent and devoid of emotion. He appears uninterested in life itself-only in appearance, however, since his final monologue, in which he finally erupts, reveals the full depth of his psyche and his relationship to the world. A relationship to the world that feels painfully tangible in him, for it is a world he does not understand, one from which he himself feels like a stranger. He seems to operate according to a value system of his own, whose ambiguity prevents us from fully grasping him.

François Ozon's direction is highly accomplished and renders the dramatic and emotional stakes of the story with great sensitivity and relevance, while placing it in context with classicism and elegance. The cinematography is beautiful, its composition meticulously crafted, magnificently showcasing Algiers and its surroundings in a way that fully immerses the viewer in the narrative and makes it tangible.

The film also takes a slight step aside and comments, with some distance, on the novel's post-colonial context, opening with fake television news footage and giving prominence to the Algerian victim and his family (the film closes on them). This contextualization, however, remains very cautious and never allows itself to challenge Camus's vision.

One may thus regret a languid, somewhat slow pace which, rather than fascinating and adding depth, tends to give the film a self-conscious quality-aware of its own merits and seemingly aiming for masterpiece status and the awards ceremonies that might accompany it. Crushed by the mythology of the book, the film becomes overbearing, stifling both discourse and emotion. Too theoretical and lacking visceral power, it is not the masterpiece it dreams of being. A shame, though it remains a very solid work and well worth seeing on the big screen.

Ozon's adaptation of *The Stranger* pales beside Visconti's, despite its faithfulness to Camus's text. The film's greatest misstep is its reduction of Meursault to a brooding, one-dimensional sociopath-a portrayal that feels at odds with my interpretation of the character. This isn't a critique of the actor Benjamin Voisin, however, he has been wrongly directed imho. Marcello Mastroianni's performance is masterful: his "actively passive" detachment, his content mechanical functioning without true comprehension, and his dreamlike disconnection from reality all shine through in the unbearable heat.

Having read the novel, I'm convinced Meursault is undiagnosed autistic. His peculiar, ('strange', hence The Stranger) behaviours, the very traits that seal his fate, strike me as more pathological than sociopathic. While critics often analyse him through philosophical or psychological frameworks, I find those readings unnecessarily convoluted. To me, Meursault is neither a nihilist nor a racist; he's simply a man whose mind and senses operate differently from the norm. Today we would call it Asperger's syndrome.

As for the film's added final scene-a departure from the book-it feels heavy-handed. The reference, likely a last-minute concession forced by the producers, to placate certain audiences, comes across as overly woke.

I saw this one at the AFI Film Festival in Hollywood. French film of Camus's existentialist novel about an apathetic Frenchman whose total indifference to life causes tragic results. Very well acted by the handsome Benjamin Voisin in the titular role. The rest of the cast provides good support. Direction is adequate and the period recreations are very good. The film follows the novel very well and comes recommended for fans of the novel. 7/10.