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A<\/span> heatstricken reverie of violence and mystery unfolds in this film, a numb ecstasy of the inexplicable, as experienced by a sensitive white European under the unbearable noonday sun. Set in 1940s French Algeria (and filmed in Morocco), Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus\u2019s novella L\u2019Etranger<\/a> has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book\u2019s themes of empire and race \u2013 changes that include a critique of the original text \u2013 this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material\u2019s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title\u2019s meaning.<\/p>\n An archive reel introduces us briskly to Algiers and its casbah, with a hint of Julien Duvivier\u2019s P\u00e9p\u00e9 Le Moko; then we are shown our antihero Meursault, remanded there on trial for the capital crime of murder, played with many an unreadable moue of listless unconcern by Benjamin Voisin. Flashbacks show us his dull office job in Algiers, where he turns down a promotion and transfer to Paris, one of his many shrugging gestures of indifference to his own interests.<\/p>\n We also see his blank, undemonstrative reaction to news that his mother, whom he placed in a state care home many miles away, has died, apparently of old age (she was 60). Meursault goes to the funeral, where like all the other mourners, he has to follow her coffin to the church on foot in the blazing heat and is blankly unmoved by the sight of his late mother\u2019s gentleman admirer and fellow care home resident fainting just before the service from grief and heat exhaustion.<\/p>\n