Directed by François Ozon
Certificate 15
120 minutes
Released 10 April

The figure of the antihero a protagonist of a story, with less praiseworthy qualities than we traditionally expect from a hero can be traced back through Western culture to the Greek and Romans. However, it was only well into the twentieth century, in the shift away from Christianity and its framework of good and evil moral values, that the idea really spread out into popular culture.

A major factor in that shift was existentialism, the movement characterised by French writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In particular, Camus’s 1942 novella L’Étranger (The Stranger), had a protagonist, Meursault, who is the archetypal antihero.

Although he attends her funeral, Meursault seems indifferent to both his mother’s death and the girl he sleeps with. Living in French Algiers, he hangs out with a pimp and is convicted and imprisoned after fatally shooting an Arab. In prison, he finds the chaplain’s attempts to talk to him about spiritual matters an irritation.

The Arab he kills is never named in the book. The omission can be read as racist, and the director of this adaptation, François Ozon (Frantz, Everything Went Fine) revises it by closing the film with the dead man’s grave, showing the headstone, restoring something of the man’s basic, human dignity.

Benjamin Voisin is utterly believable as Meursault, giving a mannered performance which might reasonably be described as deadpan. It’s an extraordinary portrayal, and direction of an actor, given that no-one else here is acting in that way. That deadpan attitude extends to the entire narrative.

The audience is invited to side with Meursault by all this. And yet, less distanced, more normal, arguably more human, performances given by the other most notably Rebecca actorsMarder as Mersault’s girlfriend Marie plus the occasional use of Arabic, give us space to identify with different characters.

Ozon has the cultural awareness to run ‘Killing an Arab’ by The Cure over his end credits. But this decision which pales beside the significance of simply naming the murder victim. His revisionist adaptation of the novella stands against French colonial racism yet retains the book’s remarkable qualities.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. His website is jeremycprocessing.com