The Stranger

The Stranger aka L’Étranger

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Benjamin Voisin as Meursault

Albert Camus always rejected the queer reading of his novel L’Étranger, but director François Ozon insists on it in his adaptation. One of the urtexts of existentialism known for its blank refusal of emotion, the book famously opens with its antihero coolly announcing the death of his mother. Ozon’s Meursault (no cosy first name), for his part, tells us similarly blankly that “I killed an Arab”, again shifting the story slightly. The dead man was a “stranger” – one translation of “L’étranger”. Another is “outsider”, and refers to Meursault himself, a white Frenchman in brown Algeria, a coloniser in someone else’s country. Ozon gets all this done just like that and then proceeds … Read more

The Stranger

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Mr Wilson with Mary

The Stranger is an entertaining enough noirish thriller but the real fun comes from watching it as a contest between a maverick director and a studio that wanted their hireling to turn out Hollywood product rather than a grand auteurish statement. The director is Orson Welles and the year is 1946. Welles was at a low ebb. He hadn’t been let near a feature film on his own for four years. 1941’s Citizen Kane had flopped and the follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, had gone so far over schedule and over budget that the studio had taken it off Welles, cut an hour and reshot whole chunks of it. It also bombed. Future generations … Read more

23 November 2015-11-23

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Tom Cruise hangs onto a cargo plane in Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

Out This Week Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, cert 12) Tom Cruise’s desire to be James Bond really gets the better of him in M:I5, a flabby action spectacular which has visited Vienna, London, Langley, Paris and Havana within its first 20 minutes or so, right after the pre-credits sequence which sees Jason Bourne, hang on, Ethan Hunt clambering onto the outside of a cargo plane as it’s taking off. A stunt done for real, we’re told, and impressive whether it was or wasn’t. Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed, so there’s plenty of that “who is the real bad guy?” attitude that was the making of The Usual Suspects, but here is … Read more