The Stranger — Characters & Cast

Not ambition or desire but truthfulness of sensation: he will not claim feelings he does not have, even when a single conventional lie would save his life.

Begins as a passive registrar of sensations, moving through his mother's funeral, an affair and a friendship without ever claiming a motive. The killing on the beach turns him from observer into object of scrutiny; imprisonment and the trial force him, for the first time, to account for a self he has never examined. He ends by refusing the chaplain's consolation and consciously embracing the indifference of the world — passivity transformed into a chosen position.

To be loved back, and to be recognised as more than a pleasant habit in a man who refuses the vocabulary of love.

A young typist from Meursault's office who becomes his lover, bringing lightness, sea air and laughter into the film's first half. Ozon gives her more weight than the novel does: her attempts to draw feeling out of him, and then her position in the courtroom where her happiness is turned into evidence of his depravity, make her the film's emotional conscience.

Wounded pride and the need for an accomplice who will validate him without judging — which Meursault, incapable of judging anyone, perfectly does.

The neighbour and pimp whose brutality toward an Arab woman sets the whole tragedy in motion. He befriends Meursault, extracts from him a letter and then a favour, and hands him the revolver that will be fired on the beach. In court his reputation becomes retroactive proof of Meursault's own supposed criminality — the friend as fatal association.