Word: meursaults
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...flaws and hubris (a word which threatens to repeat the rise of "chairman") did not cause their undoing. Like the antagonist in a twentieth-century novel by Kafka or Camus, their enemy is faceless, irrational and overpowering. The Vietnamese are the real-life counterparts of Joseph K. and Meursault; they attain nobility by resisting oppression...
...Palace across the street. Two restaurants, lavish wine cellar (stock valued at $125,000). Suggested entree: lobster à l'américaine (sauteed in butter, flamed with brandy and served on a bed of rice with its own lobster sauce). Or Dover sole, poached in cream sauce and Meursault, garnished with baby shrimps. The tab: about...
...camera first catches the clerk Meursault (Marcello Mastroianni) on a bus ride to the old people's home where his mother has died. Meticulously, it builds up the minutiae of the life of this moderately attractive, affably uncommitted man-working, making love to his girl friend (Anna Karina), watching the street life of Algiers...
Every frame is dominated by the dizzying North African heat; with blinding sunlight and sweat-drenched bodies, Visconti comes close to prostrating his audience as he builds Meursault's unexpected, meaningless murder of an Arab on the beach. It is stifling, too, in the courtroom where Meursault is condemned, as much for his disengagement from society's proprieties and his refusal to pretend pieties he does not feel as for the crime itself...
Until then, The Stranger is an exceptionally taut, abrasive film. But with Meursault awaiting the guillotine, the action of the book-and the movie-moves inside his mind. The camera is left staring at Mastroianni while his voice on the sound track soliloquizes on life, death and the meaninglessness of it all. The sequence is faithful to what Camus wrote, but it is a shame that Visconti could not have found a more cinematic way of getting it across in a film whose power otherwise almost matches the book that inspired...