DRAMA, 2hr 2min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin
Amour fou: Voisin and Marder
Taking the classic 1942 Albert Camus novel for a striking black-and-white spin, Swimming Pool film-maker François Ozon slips without a splash into the disquieting life of unknowable automaton Mersault (Voisin, who also starred in Ozon’s Summer of 85).
Elevating self-containment to an existential end point, the handsome loner reacts to a telegram announcing his mother’s death with the same lack of emotion he brings to every languid move. Keeping vigil by her unadorned coffin in the Algerian rest home in which she spent her final years — and later, at her paltry funeral — Mersault, like a living ghost in a featureless inner landscape, sheds not one tear.
Since the film’s opening scene deals with his arrival in prison on a murder charge, the meagre rest-home funeral is the first in a series of expository flashbacks in which the hollow anti-hero barely exists. Witnessing his deadening unconcern, it’s impossible to picture him summoning the energy to kill anyone.
Moving right along in flashback mode, Mersault has sex with a worshipful woman (Marder as Marie) for whom his feelings are typically tepid. “Do you love me?” she asks him, with every good reason. “That means nothing,” he cruelly replies. (Incredibly, dear reader, she was up for marrying him anyway.)
When not dallying with Marie, Mersault works without any discernible enthusiasm at an unspecified office job. He hangs out with his bullish neighbour, Raymond (Lottin), whose beating of his girlfriend, witnessed by an unmoved Mersault, will be the catalyst for later, disastrous events. I could go on, but you get the downbeat picture: Mersault is a blank slate onto which others project their expectations and their needs. And since his upcoming crime is pretty much a foregone conclusion, the pivotal question it raises is where, in the name of cause and effect, his amoral indifference is coming from.
