Lo straniero

“Luchino Visconti’s least acclaimed film, an adaptation of Albert Camus’ ‘The Stranger’ that had a very mixed  reception on its release despite hewing incredible close to the novel and which has since hardly been screened. The seemingly unforgivable: the world of shadows, the existential void that surrounds the book’s indifferent protagonist, is decked out with a wealth of carefully reconstructed, realistic details, while the equally intangible existentialist antihero is given psychology and the star presence of Marcello Mastroianni. The portrait of total alienation, the story of a meaningless murder and its consequence must share space here—in typical Visconti style—with the portrait of a society. Visconti’s Stranger: Algiers in the 1930s, interwoven with racism and tensions between the local colonialized population and the French colonizers” (Christoph Huber)