Lo straniero directed by Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1967)
L’Étranger directed by François Ozon (France, 2025)
These two films are seperated by almost half a century but are otherwise quite similar in mood. The source for both is of course Albert Camus’s 1952 novel which in English is generally translated as ‘The Outsider’. This is a kind of ur-text for existentialism.
In the afterward to the novel, Camus wrote of his Algerian anti-hero Meursault: “One wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing ‘The Outsider as a story of a man who, without any heroic pretentions, agrees to die for the truth.”
This is a neat sound bite but ignores the not irrelevant detail that this is also a man who killed an Arab man for reasons that are never entirely clear. Being blinded by the sun is his lame defence in the courtroom. Such a state of confusion might have accounted for one shot after being threatened with a knife but doesn’t explain why he then fired four more bullets into the lifeless body.
The Arab is basically a clunky plot device with racist implications. Camus doesn’t even bother to give readers the dead man’s name. The man’s anonimity is carried through to Visconti’s film but is partially corrected in Ozon’s version which ends with an image of the victim’s gravestone. In both films the focus is squarely on Meursault depicting him as a suave, elegant man of few words. Marcello Mastroianni has such a natural charm that it’s hard to think too badly of him. Benjamin Voisin conveys to cold-hearted detachment more convincingly.
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Spare a thought for lonely film critics in the age of streaming. They are an increasingly marginalized and, some would say, dying breed.
It goes without saying that David Lynch divides audiences. His surreal visions of the world and the tall tales he weaves are never going to be to everyone’s taste.
If Dune is David Lynch’s prize turkey, Fire Walk With Me, follows as a close second. It is significant that neither are included in the ‘select filmography’ in ‘Catching The Big Fish’, Lynch’s collection of anecdotal reflections on meditation, consciousness and creativity published in 2006.
