Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger‘, published in 1942—one of the works that earned the author the Nobel Prize in Literature—has been adapted into a stylized film, co-written and directed by
François Ozon. While Camus is, of course, credited as the source for the screenplay, the name of Kamel Daoud could well have been included; his 2013 novel, ‘The Meursault Investigation‘, significantly influenced the shift in perspective that the story undergoes on screen. Although the film is formally crafted with great care to reconstruct the period, the director’s vision—which seeks to impose a personal interpretation infused with modern themes—takes the work in a very different direction. Rather than Camus’s ‘The Stranger‘, what we see here is François Ozon’s ‘The Stranger‘.
In Camus’s original, ‘The Stranger‘ recounts a crime from the perspective of the perpetrator, attempting to explore the psychological mechanisms behind his actions. Meursault is a young French clerk born in Algeria—a land he considers his true home, to the point that he rejects a career advancement that would require moving to Paris. Jaded and indifferent to the emotions of those around him, he proves incapable of feeling—not even upon his mother’s death, nor when a young woman named Marie falls in love with him and proposes marriage. Perhaps such feelings do not exist for him at all? His relationships with those around him are proper yet highly reserved; he neither rejects others nor engages with them—whether it concerns Marie, his neighbor Salamano (who loses his dog, his only companion), or another neighbor, Sintés, a pimp who is brutal toward his local mistress. When the latter’s conflict with the woman’s family escalates into violence, Meursault does not shy away from getting involved—is this mere indifference? Or perhaps a touch of colonial racism, given that those he finds himself in conflict with are ‘Arabs’? Accused of murder, he refuses to resort to the conventional lies that might have saved his life, nor will he feign remorse or turn to a deity he does not believe in—a gesture that might have ‘saved’ his soul.
I appreciated how the atmosphere of colonial Algeria on the eve of the Second World War is recreated, depicting a social order rooted in segregation. For the most part, the action unfolds within the social bubble of the French settlers, yet external pressures remain ever-present—from the people encountered on the street to the blinding glare of the sun and the oppressive heat that seems to radiate right off the screen. The cinematography is stylish, and the use of black and white is a perfect fit. This is my first time seeing Benjamin Voisin, who plays the lead; he is certainly a name to add to the list of promising young French actors. Rebecca Marder is also excellent—I had already taken note of her in ‘Mon crime‘, Ozon’s previous film. As always, Denis Lavant’s appearance is both exotic and striking. Beyond its technical merits and the quality of the acting, I cannot say that I enjoyed ‘The Stranger’. François Ozon abandons the detached, humorous approach seen in his previous films, opting instead for an ideologically charged reframing of the novel’s story. While the dialogue from the book is faithfully incorporated into the screenplay, the few lines that were added—along with the final scene (which is, admittedly, cinematically beautiful)—shift the film’s message toward an overt anti-colonialism, a theme that is either absent or merely hinted at in Camus’s original work. In my view, this was unnecessary—but such is Ozon’s ‘The Stranger‘.