Monthly Archives: April 2026

The Stranger    Francois Ozon (Fr; 2025)  Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder

viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 April 2026; ticket £13.25

Pardonnez-moi!

There is one scene towards the end of Francois Ozon’s adaptation of Camus’           ‘L’ Étranger’ (The Stranger) that defines the formulaic mediocre nature of his film.  Mersault’s trial on charge of murder is over. He’s been found guilty and sentenced to death.  The courtroom empties but two people stay put in their seats:  Marie, Mersault’s girlfriend and Djemila the sister of the murdered Arab.  Marie rises and walks across to Djemila.  Marie looks at her and apologies for the death of her brother. Apology made Marie departs.

This above courtroom scene encapsulates the dishonesty at the core of Ozon’s movie.  The scene is a second rate lazy borrowing from the sort of formula typically employed by Hollywood writers to script in artificial encounters that are thought necessary to the establishment of the status of a story.   Ozon’s characters, in the opposite of a ‘meet cute’ situation, are manipulated into space where they can be alone, so that a moral purpose can be expressed.  Ozon obviously feels that in today’s climate his target audience might feel uncomfortable viewing ‘The Stranger’ without some level of gestural recognition of the iniquitous nature of the French colonisation being given  head room. Some one has to say:  “Sorry!” As it makes no psycho-philosophical sense for Mersault apologise, Ozon lays on this specially manipulated scene for the girlfriend to do the honours.  “Sorry!”.  It’s like when the IDF bomb a school killing tens of Palestinian or Lebanese children, realising the wrong target has been hit they say: ‘Sorry!’  It makes everything OK.  The ‘sorry scene’ comes across as a sort of insurance policy to deflect criticism, and a hypocritical device to appease the imagined sensitivities of his audiences.  A filmmaker of integrity would have remained true to the ethos and prejudices of Camus’ times.  Namely that Arabs were low order beings of no consequence to French or Europeans, lucky to be colonised and above all expendable.  This is what a film maker committed to truth would show, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions about the nature of the attitudes characterising ‘Algerie Francais’.

Ozon’s final betrayal of Camus comes in the last shot where we see the grave of the Arab whom Mersault has murdered.  Whereas through out his novella Camus remains true to the piednoir ethos of belittling Arabs by not giving the murdered Arab a name, Ozon panders to the neo-colonialist sensitivities of French commercial cinema by having his name chiselled into the grave’s headstone.  We see that he was: Moussa Hamdani.  The one with no name is named:  a lubricious sleight of hand to ease the film’s path through Cannes critical reception and into distribution.  A cheap gesture.

Interestingly an Algerian author Karnel Daoud in 2015 wrote a book called the ‘Mersault Investigaton’ which took as its theme Camus’ murdered Arab being given: No Name.  Daoud’s book is a reclaiming of the dead man as a man with a name a family a life.  It’s a sharply written sardonic critique of the French occupation with a sideways look at the increasingly repressive Islamic governance of Algeria.  Daoud calls Mersault’s victim: Musa.  For some reason Ozon has given the victim’s name as Moussa, a variation of Daoud’s.  Other than this oblique sort of reference Ozon has chosen to ignore the spirit of Daoud’s book and made a film that is underscored by a feeble pretense at an apologia for the crimes of colonialism.  “Sorry!”

Even on its own terms both in its structure and choice of shots ‘The Stranger’ looks like a movie of a book with which the Director has never come to terms. As he filmed his scenario he had less and less idea of what he was doing other than shooting in black and white (always a hit with the reviewers).  ‘The Stranger’ has been shot and edited the more to distract the audience from the fact that Ozone has nothing to say about Camus’ work because he doesn’t actually relate to it, perhaps he doesn’t even understand it.  It’s a property that conveniently has just come out of copyright, that now one way or anther can be realised, packaged and sold, without paying the author a sou.

After the titles,  we are given the longeur of Meursault’s day and his journey to his mother’s funeral.  This everyday business is intercut with flash forward shots to his prison cell, bugs etc evidencing that Ozon in his edit had no real conviction in this long dull long opening section of the film.  It’s characterised by maxing out on M’s life in detail: he gets up dresses makes coffee shaves sits down stands up sits down gets on the bus looks out the window.  It’s not interesting and fails to catch absurdist ennui riven nature of Camus’ prose;  multiple invariant shots of M looking out blankly towards the camera just don’t cut into the existential dilemma of ‘the absurd’.  Only access to state of mind might say this and Ozon has ditched voice over and opted for a collection of dull lifeless shots that say nothing.  Likewise the fantasy sequence bolted onto the film, featuring Mersault  meeting his dead mother at the sea side with a guillotine positioned high up on the top of a sand dune.  This looks like another act of desperation trying to inject meaning into a film that struggles in this respect.

Whilst checking for details of the players I went to Wikipedia and Internet Movie Data Base.  Looking at the cast details it was interesting to note that all the French actors were itemised with accompanying photos and links to their biographical details.  None of the Arab actors had either their pictures or links to any biography. Sorry!  ‘Plus ca change…..’ as they say. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Wind Will Carry Us    Abbas Kairostami (Iran; 1999) Behzad Dorani

viewed dvd

mirror mirror on the wall…

Kairostami’s opening sequence of “The Wind will Carry Us’ (The Wind) establishes  ‘an arriving’ and a moral proposition.  

A car speeds along a road through the mountains.  There’s an emptiness, a majestic emptiness of man that defines the landscape.  The driver of the car talks to the passengers, whose outline we can only dimly make out.  We realise that they are a film crew who’re on their way to a remote Kurd village to document the unusual death rituals of the villagers. The information is that an old lady’s on her death bed so her funeral will be an opportunity to film.   The driver, who’s ‘The Director’, tells the crew that he doesn’t want the reason for their visit to be known by the villagers.  Perhaps he’s thinking in terms of the immediate filming task that such knowledge might lead to some distortions in their relations with the villagers (perhaps he’s worried they might want payment).   He tells the crew that if asked about the purpose of their visit, they’re to say they’re looking for ‘treasure’.  But perhaps the reflex to deceive goes deeper than any immediate rationale.  Perhaps deception is an ingrained habit of film makers, a defensive paranoia to which they resort by default as a means of exerting control over the world in which they operate, control they see as necessary to their work but which also becomes part of them.    

We are not just in a film but in an ethically compromised play out. 

Kairostami’s opening sequence doesn’t just set up the situation that its scenario will play out, it establishes a moral thematic that defines and surreptitiously dominates his movie.   The underlying moral issue is: deception. More specifically the normalisation of deception how the incorporation of normalised deception into the warp of life progressively corrupts and distorts the experience of life, in particular its grounded imminence. 

The villagers of course are grounded in the very soil in which they live.  You could call it: ‘Truth’.  In the film the villagers are simply themselves, true to themselves and their way of life.  The only professional actor involved is Behead Doran who plays:  ‘The Director’.  

‘The Wind..’ is not a story;  it’s about storytelling, the relations that are needed for a story to be told.   The main person with whom ‘The Director’ interacts is the young boy who befriends him. As their relationship grows, the boy brings ‘The Director’ news as to what is happening to the old woman.  But the boy also takes on another role, the role of a mirror. The boy in his openness frankness honesty becomes an obverse mirror reflecting back to ‘The Director’ the image of his own dishonesty and world weary deception, to the point where as the relationship becomes almost too painful to bear, ‘The Director’ reveals the truth about the purpose of his stay in the village. 

Kairostami’s script spoofs the structural elements involved in the business of making a film.  When you watch a movie you see a homogeneity of form in which all the relevant shots are combined in the edit to form a seamless experience which is visually characterised by the players.  But of course this experience is defined by what we don’t see, the unseen members of the production crew.  Kairostami’s script, like the obverse mirror,  plays on reversing this relationship.  In ‘The Wind..’ it is the key characters whom we don’t see:  the dying old woman, the ditch digger, ‘The Director’s’ producer, the other members of his crew; conversely it’s the most important of the unseen crew, ‘The Director’, whom we see the most.   It’s a knock-about parody, given energy by the slap-stick scripting device of ‘The Director’s’ phone, which not working properly in the village forces him to charge off in his car to the top of a near-by hill in order to find reception good enough to speak to his increasingly irate producer.

The other unseen element of a film is the purpose for which it is made. With some films such as unalloyed propaganda movies, the intent is obvious, to reinforce an ideology or belief system. In many films the ‘why’ is not apparent; include in this Hollywood output.  Films from Hollywood are intended to make money (that is one primary purpose) but wrapped up in Hollywood’s various dramas and melodramas are powerful subtexts in relation to American values and  the American way of life.  These messages are not necessarily understood by non American audiences but the values and images are absorbed from the screen and become part of an unarticulated but engrained world view.   

With ‘The Wind….’ Kairostami is very clear that he is making a film about film making: its absurdity its corruption its deception and its detachment from the everyday.  None of this means that filmmaking is in itself an unredeemed human activity, but by virtue of power it exercises we need to keep balanced view of its nature.  Films communicate inspire amuse educate give insight provide needed distraction; there are also dark forces mostly unseen that congregate behind the picture.  

 Kairostami incorporates one dark sequence into his scenario, its meaning unclear.  ‘The Director’ looking to buy milk (life’s first food) is sent to the basement of a house in the village where in the dim half light a young girl (perhaps aged between 12 and 16) is milking a cow. ‘The Director’ stands waiting in the darkness behind her.  As she milks he suddenly launches into a full recitation of Forough Farrokhzhad’s poem ‘The Wind will Carry us” (from which of course comes the title).  The words of the poetess sound through the dark enclosed space which like the poem has a timeless quality.

Forough Farrokhzhad was viewed negatively by the Islamic revolution who banned her work for many years in an attempt to suppress her proto-feminist voice.

Farrokhzhad’s imagery conjures up features of the natural world – wind moon trees clouds – with a range of emotions – and the visitation of a phantom love.   It’s not clear if the milkmaid understands the poem – perhaps she only speaks Kurdish – but this scene suddenly charges the film with a heightened tension that coming out of nowhere shocks us, jolts the spine.  The poem, its insinuations spoken out loud infiltrate the space, an intrusion of the sensual into a the world of the manual. It’s almost a violation but the words, suggestive as they might be, are those of a woman and ‘The Director’ appears to have no ulterior or corrupting motive.  There are no clues as to what’s going on; what Kairostami intends.  We viewers have to figure it out. We have perhaps to accept the scene on its own strange terms as a collision of forces, where picture and sound, in dissonance excite two enduring expressions of the feminine: the one producing milk the other producing beautiful words, the traditional  the modern.

There are many films that take their form and structure from the idea of making a film, but Kairostami knows how to get maximum return from the idea of not being able to make a film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk