A landmark in 20th century literary modernism, the Albert Camus novella L’Étranger (The Stranger) still resonates more than 80 years after its first publication, and remains one of the three most widely read French books worldwide. The prolific writer-director François Ozon has created an achingly cool adaptation which respects the book’s text and structure without being too reverential, highlighting its lean, sensual beauty as much as its anguished ruminations on individual moral choices in an absurd, godless, indifferent universe.
Shot in piercing monochrome, Ozon’s visually ravishing version of The Stranger also plays into the book’s enduring cult status as a retro-noir design classic, capturing some of Camus’ own timeless hipster cachet as a kind of rock-star writer-philosopher who died fashionably young. The director has amassed a busy filmography, variable in quality, but this is one of his strongest efforts and should find a broad audience of readymade fans thanks to the Camus connection. Following its Venice world premiere, it is screening at San Sebastian film festival over the coming week.
Set in French-colonial Algiers in the early 1940s, The Stranger reunites Ozon with a cast of former collaborators. Sulky beauty Benjamin Voisin (Summer of ’85) stars as Meursault, the young office worker so disengaged from the hollow conventions of bourgeois society that he ends up fatally shooting an Arab boy for muddled, impulsive reasons which he barely understands himself. Rebecca Marder (The Crime is Mine) plays Meursault’s lover Marie Cardona, half-fascinated and half-disgusted by his callous detachment, while Pierre Lottin (When Autumn Comes) is his hot-headed neighbour Raymond Sintès, whose abusive treatment of his Algerian mistress Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) sets these tragic events in motion.
Surprisingly, given its hallowed status, The Stranger has only been filmed once before, by Italian maestro Luschino Visconti in 1967, a slightly overwrought interpretation starring a decade-too-old Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. Ozon stays more faithful to the book’s blankly cynical tone, though he has added some subtle 21st century touches, allowing the female and Algerian characters a little more depth, and gently foreshadowing the post-colonial future.
As in the novel, the first act mostly deals with Meursault attending his mother’s funeral in the dusty Algerian hinterlands, his refusal to show performative grief to a church full of strangers a seemingly innocuous decision that will later come back to punish him. Soon he is back in the city, swimming and smoking and flirting with Marie, their budding romance tinged with existential ennui. “Do you love me?” she asks. “Love means nothing,” he pouts. Which may well be the most French piece of movie dialogue ever written.
Meursault’s friendship with the boorish, misogynistic Raymond seems equally devoid of moral or emotional wight. On a day trip to the beach, it is Raymond’s gun he uses, killing his victim in a fateful clash that falls somewhere between self-defence and reckless accident. Arrested and tried for the murder, his radical honesty ultimately condemns him, refusing to show hypocritical contrition, turning down fabricated alibis that could save his life, angrily shunning priests offering pious counsel. At one point he blames his fatal actions on sweltering, dazzling sunlight, foolishly defying Michael Jackson’s age-old wisdom. Never blame it on the sunshine, always blame it on the boogie.
The Stranger was published in 1942, more than a decade before Algeria’s anti-colonial war with France began. Born and raised in the French colony, Camus was notoriously equivocal on the conflict, favouring reconciliation over armed struggle. He died in a car crash two years before Algeria achieved independence. But Ozon has managed to incorporate this wider historical hindsight into the story in subtle ways, highlighting anti-occupation graffiti on the streets of Algiers, and stressing the casual racism of the European settlers.
Most significantly, he has given names and a hint of wider back story to the two main Arab characters, Meursault’s murder victim Moussa Hamdani (Abderrahmane Dehkani) and his sister Djemila, Raymond’s mistress. Both were nameless cyphers in the book, a decision which Ozon (and others) defend as a deliberate literary effect to reinforce Meursault’s detachment rather than evidence of racism in Camus himself. Ozon’s choice of the name Moussa may be a sly homage to Algerian author Kamel Daoud’s prize-winning 2013 novel The Meursault Investigation, which re-told The Stranger through the eyes of its Arab characters.
The Stranger received mixed notices at its Venice premiere, with some criticising its laborious pace and Voisin’s blank screen presence. All the same, Meursault remains compelling as an archetype of intellectual rebels and literary anti-heroes, part of a pantheon that includes Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. Indeed, Ozon has alluded to Alain Delon’s iconic portrayal of Ripley in press interviews, though he stops short of making Meursault a chilling sociopath. The novel’s philosophical core, about how to live honestly and purposely in an amoral universe, remain intact here.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ozon also resists the urge to play Meursault’s aloof otherness as Ripley-style coded queerness, though there is a faint flicker of homoerotic tension between killer and victim, while cinematographer Manu Dacosse undoubtedly frames Voisin as a sculpturally beautiful sex object, favouring an aesthetic rooted more in Bruce Weber’s 1980s fashion shoots than in Bresson or Bergman. The film’s high-resolution monochrome visuals are consistently luscious overall, with the rugged desert vistas and shimmering beaches of Morocco standing in for pre-independence Algeria.
Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri’s timeless score is another strong element, blending electronics with Arabic instrumentation. An end-credits appearance by The Cure’s “Killing an Arab”, a 1979 post-punk classic inspired by the original Camus novel, is a pleasingly cheeky coda, a perfect audiovisual marriage that waited almost half a century for the stars to align.
Director, producer: François Ozon
Screenwriters: François Ozon, Philippe Piazzo, based on the novel L’Etranger by Albert Camus
Cast: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant, Swann Arlaud, Christophe Malavoy, Nicolas Vaude, Jean-Charles Clichet, Mireille Perrier, Hajar Bouzaouit, Abderrahmane Dehkani, Jérôme Pouly, Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat, Christophe Vandevelde, Jean-Benoît Ugeux
Cinematography: Manu Dacosse
Editing: Clément Selitzki
Music: Fatima Al Qaddiri
Production designer: Katia Wyszkop
Production company: Foz (France), Gaumont (France), France 2 Cinéma (France)
World sales: Gaumont, Paris
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Perlak)
In French, Arabic
123 minutes
