Can someone be killed by sunstroke?

No French filmmaker had dared to adapt a work into a film until now. The foreigner ofAlbert CamusPerhaps out of respect for this seminal work of modern literature, which is articulated from a subjectivity alienated from conventional forms of socialization, a perspective difficult to translate onto the big screen. François Ozon Ozon transports us to French-occupied Algeria through a stylized black and white that helps reconstruct an idealized image from the French imagination of that colonial period. It is within this image, as beautiful as it is false, that his protagonist, Meursault, is inscribed—the young man who destabilizes this appearance of normality when he murders an Arab boy for what he claims is sunstroke.

A splendid Benjamin Voisin brings to life this attractive but emotionally detached young man, who is ultimately judged more for sentimental apathy than for homicide. In the first part of the film, Ozon remains quite faithful to Camus, capturing the character's inner detachment in a luminous and seemingly splendid country. But in the second part, he excessively emphasizes the novel's subtext in the farcical tone of the trial and in his insistence on sympathetically bringing us closer to the protagonist's inner torment. He also attempts to resolve the last great challenge of a contemporary adaptation of The foreigner: the naturalization of colonialism, prosaically making this nameless Arab victim invisible.