Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: What everyone gets wrong about The Stranger

It has taken more than 80 years for L’Étranger (1942) to be adapted successfully for the big screen. Luchino Visconti’s 1967 version of Albert Camus’ first novel is a baroque shambles, not least because Marcello Mastroianni is so spectacularly miscast as Meursault (the director’s first choice was apparently Alain Delon, which makes a lot more sense).

In contrast, François Ozon’s movie is as spare, beautiful and haunting as the book itself; the exquisite monochrome aesthetic of cinematographer Manu Dacosse capturing with precision the bleached walls and beaches of Algeria under French colonial rule. Best of all, Benjamin Voisin delivers a truly remarkable performance as the office worker who ends up in court after murdering an Arab.

Before that fateful, unintelligible horror, Meursault takes time off to attend the funeral of his mother, who has died at her residential home. The impassivity with which Voisin keeps vigil in a sweltering room beside her simple coffin is both pathological and plausible. As he watches her elderly, grief-stricken fiancé, Perez (Joël Cudennec) stumble in the heat, he continues to smoke his cigarette with blank indifference.

At the baths, Meursault bumps into his friend Marie (Rebecca Marder) and, after going to see Marcel Pagnol’s comedy Le Schpountz (1938) starring the rubber-faced Fernandel, they tumble into bed. She suggests that they marry, to which he replies: “If you want.” 

It is not that he is a recluse: he goes drinking with Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin), an alleged pimp who beats his Arab girlfriend Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and is being menaced by her brothers; he listens to his old neighbour Salamano (Denis Lavant) who mistreats his dog and then mourns its disappearance; and he is given spirited support in court by Céleste (Jérôme Pouly) the owner of the café where he eats. But, for Meursault, none of these connections are fully formed or emotionally meaningful. 

For the 18 years that remained of his life after publication, Camus was frustrated by the widespread misreading of L’Étranger as a rejection of basic morality. Inspired by Augustine and ancient Greek philosophy, he intended to construct a myth of humanity’s quest for meaning in an absurd universe. As Robert Emmet Meagher writes in Albert Camus and the Human Crisis (2021): “Meursault is meant to provoke thought, not inspire a following… This is no place for a literal mind.”

Ozon honours that intention in this exceptional film and complements it with a more contemporary sensitivity to the racist character of Meursault’s crime, granting the victim the dignity of a name: Moussa Hamdani (Abderrahmane Dehkani). Those who see such additions as a betrayal of Camus would do well to recall the author’s passionate early journalism about the injustices of French imperialism.

Suggested Reading

What can Camus’s The Stranger teach Gen Z?

Jason Solomons

STREAMING 

Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+)

It is often asked why Jon Hamm never became a superstar and the answer is that he did – but in a new form, and one that is specific to the golden age of prestige television. When you play a role as iconic as Don Draper in a series as important and enduring as Mad Men (2008-15), you burrow deep into the cultural consciousness.

Which is why it was wise of him to wait a decade before accepting another televisual leading role: as Andy “Coop” Cooper, sacked from his job as a big-league hedge funder, who resorts to burgling his neighbours’ homes in (fictional) Westmont Village, New York, in partnership with one of the local housekeepers Elena (Aimee Carrero).

In its first season, Jonathan Cropper’s show took the now-familiar genre of respectable but desperate people turning to crime – Weeds, Breaking Bad, Ozark – and mashed it up with broad comedy and crisp social satire.

Coop’s second career as a thief remains the through-line in this new tranche of ten episodes (in an early scene, he puts his back out while stealing a $165,000 Mont Blanc), but more time is devoted to character, often intensely so. When his best friend and business manager Barney (Hoon Lee) finds out what he has been up to, he wants in – seeking some excitement in his own life of quiet desperation. 

Meanwhile, Coop’s ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) is navigating perimenopause, and, having lost her own job as a therapist, trying to write a book while raising their children Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan). “How the hell did this happen?” she asks him. “We were never meant to get this old.”

What little prospect Coop has of finding some form of stability is wrecked when chaos agent Owen Ashe (James Marsden) – a shipping billionaire and suspected arms dealer – arrives in the neighbourhood, determined to make his mark and squeeze every lemon on the plutocratic tree. When the newcomer throws a lavish house-warming party, Coop watches his neighbours carouse “like they were living in an F Scott Fitzgerald fever dream.” But a moment of serious misjudgement gives Ashe maximum leverage over him – “I own your ass” – and sends Coop spinning back into the world of finance (and not in a good way).

Your Friends & Neighbors is especially strong in its portrayal of social ritual: a suburban wake, a high society seder, a country club function, a weekend at a Hamptons beach-house. And there is plenty of dramatic space to explore the personal dysfunction lurking beneath it all: the misery of a husband belittled by his father-in-law; the defiance of a daughter who does not want to go to Princeton simply because her parents did; the bewilderment of self-styled alpha males wondering if they have accomplished anything worthwhile (“You’re never, ever there. There is no there.”)

What started as an engaging, noir-ish crime caper is maturing into a pin-sharp X-ray of Gen X and all its foibles, with Hamm at heart of it all, exuding the distinctively American combination of absolute confidence and half-buried bafflement. Already renewed for a well-deserved third season.

THEATRE

Copenhagen (Hampstead Theatre, until May 2)

In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen: both men were founding fathers of quantum mechanics, both Nobel laureates, and – formerly – the closest of friends and collaborators, Bohr having acted both as scholarly patron and surrogate father to the younger man. 

But now Heisenberg was a senior scientist attached to the Nazi atomic bomb research project (the Uranverein); and Bohr, who was Jewish, lived in an occupied country. What exactly the two physicists said to each other in their famous conversation, and why, is one of the most contested questions of 20^th century history. 

Michael Longhurst’s welcome revival of Michael Frayn’s masterly play, first performed in 1998, boasts a first-class cast: Richard Schiff (best known as Toby Ziegler in The West Wing) as Bohr; Alex Kingston as his wife Margrethe; and Damien Molony as Heisenberg. All three have the depth and agility to capture both the bruised, conflicting emotions of the characters, and the profoundly cerebral nature of their discussion.

Mirroring the complexity of atomic structure and of Frayn’s play – which imagines the trio in spectral form looking back at the fierce dispute the visit ignited – Joanna Scotcher’s set is a dual-revolve turntable, beautifully lit by Neil Austin. The effect is both beguiling and disorienting.

Did Heisenberg hope to recruit Bohr, or to tip him off to the progress (or lack of it) made by the Nazis? Was he risking his life in the hope that his friend would get word to the Americans that they should not accelerate their own efforts? Or was Heisenberg going even further and signalling to Bohr that he would discreetly sabotage Germany’s nuclear research?

The extraordinary achievement of Frayn’s play is to weave the mind-bending concepts of quantum physics – specifically, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s theory of complementarity – into the tapestry of human life (what the 92-year-old writer has called “the epistemology of intention”). As Heisenberg says: “you can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else”, recalling Bohr’s earlier line: “Some questions have no answers to find”.

In a wonderful echo of the quantum principle that observation changes the state of systems, Frayn’s play has itself had a considerable impact upon this long and unresolved controversy – and all the talk of uranium enrichment gives it an additional dark topicality. Don’t miss this marvellous theatrical experience – and if you are tempted by the rabbit-hole (and it is a rewarding one) start with Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in Debate, Ed. Matthias Dörries (2005).

STREAMING

The Pete Davidson Show (Netflix)

If Pete Davidson had only ever appeared in the legendary “Pool Boy” sketch with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Saturday Night Live in 2016, I would still think of him as one of the great comic talents of the past 20 years. Now 32, having grown up in the limelight and experienced addiction and mental health problems, he is sober, the father of an infant daughter and – perhaps not surprisingly – a podcast host.

Happily, his easy-going charisma, laced with comic candour about his abiding neuroses, translates well to the format. Using a garage as his studio, he does not seek to solve all the geopolitical issues of the world (unlike some stand-ups) or to crack the mind-body problem. 

Instead, Davidson recreates the atmosphere of a comedy club green room, swapping funny stories, tips and wild theories with his showbusiness friends. With Dan Soder (Mafee in Billions) he identifies genius in the movies of Jason Statham; Jon Stewart discusses humble beginnings with him (“Do you like eating soup made only of shoelaces?”); Charlamagne tha God reveals that, in private, Hillary Clinton is magnificently foul-mouthed (more than capable of “a Samuel L. Jackson-esque ‘motherfucker’”); and he and Kenan Thompson ask whether Tom Cruise actually exists.

Like Davidson himself, the half-hour shows are charming, goofy and very entertaining. Recommended.