François Ozon’s Bold Camus Interpretation

Before Dean Moriarty in On the Road and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, there was Meursault, the nihilistic antihero of Albert Camus’ first novel, The Stranger (L’étranger), and one of modern culture’s original bad boys.

Both a murderer and an ungrateful son (he’s sentenced to death for the former, but only because the court believes he’s the latter), Meursault narrates the short and shattering book in a stark language of indifference, filling it with piercing observations on life in French Algeria during the late 1930s. Semi-autobiographical in one sense and despondently poetic in the other, The Stranger launched Camus’ career as a major 20th century author. Years later, it became a standard of many a school curriculum both in France and abroad.

It’s also not an easy book to adapt. The great Luchino Visconti tried once before, in a 1967 version starring Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault and Anna Karina as the young killer’s love interest, Marie. That film was made in the Italian maestro’s signature style, which was too lush and epic to capture the novel’s sense of solitude and abandon, its harsh inner voice describing a cruel and sometimes beautiful world. “Dostoevsky on the beach,” would be one way to sum up the book’s unique tone, which works splendidly on the page but does not necessarily translate well to the screen.

And yet, French writer-director François Ozon’s new adaption, which premiered in competition at Venice, gets many, many things right. First and foremost, the prolific filmmaker — The Stranger is his 24th feature since his debut, See the Sea, was released in 1997 — finds an exquisite way to transform Camus’ words into pictures. In this case, stunningly high-contrast black-and-white images (lensed by Belgian cinematographer Manu Dacosse, Evolution) that convey the author’s eye for immersive detail, plunging us into a Mediterranean world of sea, sex and sun that’s enchanting until it becomes unbearable, like an open-air prison that eventually turns into a real one.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Ozon diverges from the text in a few key places to offer a postcolonial reading of a novel that was published two decades before Algeria liberated itself from French rule. 

In Camus’ book, the viewpoint of the Arab characters is altogether absent. (Those seeking it should read Kamel Daoud’s excellent 2013 retelling, The Meursault Investigation.) In his movie, Ozon has chosen to give Algerians more of a voice, albeit in a succinct fashion, commenting on the indifference of Frenchmen toward a situation that would soon give way to violent revolution.

Camus purists (if they exist) may take issue with this, because the author was far from an ardent supporter of Algerian independence. But the director deserves credit for finding an intelligent way to update The Stranger for a generation that has come to reject colonialism both past and present.

This may all sound a little, well, French-intellectual, whereas in reality, Ozon’s film is a pleasure to watch both aesthetically and dramatically, even if it lags a bit in the third act. But up until Meursault, who’s played by Benjamin Voisin (star of Ozon’s memorable teen drama, Summer of 85), gets arrested for shooting a young Algerian man (Abderrahmane Dehkani) point blank on the beach, The Stranger is a feast of sights, sounds and existential turmoil.

After an opening newsreel proves how disparagingly the French looked upon Algerians at the time, we find Meursault alone in his apartment when he learns about the death of his mother (Mireille Perrier). Handsome and withdrawn — he hardly speaks, and when he does it’s often to say, “Je ne sais pas” — the taciturn office clerk heads to the countryside to hold vigil over his mother’s body, which is laid out in a dismal retirement home. 

Ozon conveys the loneliness of Meursault, not to mention the desolation of the people he encounters, through striking shots that frame them against barren landscapes or interiors (the latter courtesy of production designer Katia Wyszkop, who recreates the epoch with pristine detail). When Meursault returns to Algiers after the funeral, the film shifts tones to showcase the sun-baked beauty of a colonial capital at the height of its splendor, while occasionally cutting away to reveal an Arab population treated like second-class citizens.

During a visit to the seaside, Meursault bumps into an old friend, Marie (the excellent Rebecca Marder). Although he’s supposed to be mourning his mother’s demise, he quickly embarks on an affair that, at least from his point of view, is much more about carnal satisfaction than love — something Ozon conjures through sensual images of bodies glistening in the sun or sweating beneath bedsheets, not to mention a few butt shots. Meursault also starts hanging out with his shady and brutish French neighbor, Raymond (Pierre Lottin), whose abusive relationship with an Algerian girl (Hajar Bouzaouit) eventually leads to the murder.

Camus’ book is split evenly before and after the killing, whereas the film spends more time chronicling Meursault’s life up to the point he’s arrested. Some of the movie’s best scenes highlight the deep despair of that life, emphasizing how Meursault is indeed a stranger (or outsider, as the title of the book was first translated to in English) in a land under occupation. Again, this was not what Camus may have believed, but Ozon implies that Meursault’s alienation also stems from the oppression he’s perpetuating, whether consciously or not, in a country soon to be embroiled in a bloody war of independence.

The last act of The Stranger follows the young man through his imprisonment, trial and the weeks leading up to his execution, including a long and somewhat overwrought conversation with a priest (Swann Arlaud) hoping to read the inmate his last rites. Just as in the book, we understand that Meursault is condemned to death not only because of his act, but because of his failure to display regular human emotions, whether about the crime he committed or his recently dead mom.  

With lots of hefty dialogue and basically one indoor location, Ozon’s movie loses some momentum during those theatrical closing reels, although the performances help to keep the energy level high. Voisin — who played another hero of a French classic in Xavier Giannoli’s 2021 adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions — carries the entire drama as a lost soul whose physical beauty (perfect jawline, killer abs) can hardly conceal the emptiness inside of him.

Some of Ozon’s earlier films (Swimming Pool, Young & Beautiful, Water Drops on Burning Rocks) were populated by similarly icy characters, which may be why he was the right candidate to adapt Camus’ frigid account of murder in a white-hot land. What’s impressive here is how he found the ideal aesthetic to do so, all the while taking liberties — including a glimpse of homoeroticism before the beach killing — with such a sacred text. 

Meursault has long been a household name for students of modern literature or French existentialism, or anyone else who had to read the book in high school. In that sense, perhaps the movie’s greatest invention is to also give a name to the nameless “Arab” whom Meursault kills, forging an identity for someone who had always been anonymous. Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his Algerian victim may live on as a harbinger of what’s to come — that is, of a time when rebels like Meursault no longer exist, in a country finally free of them.