The Stranger

Note: François Ozon’s The Stranger was screened as part of the 45th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. For the full lineup of films available between April 8-19, check out the schedule here. The film is currently in limited theatrical release. 

Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger (L’Étranger) receives a largely faithful and, arguably, timely adaptation in director François Ozon’s new film. The text is one of those seminal works of French literature that belongs on any introductory twentieth-century philosophy or literature course syllabus, with a cynical worldview anticipated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and echoed in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Alienation, disenchantment with humanity, and existential emptiness fuel these books in distinct ways, capturing a headspace that has eluded any meaningful attempt to adapt them into worthwhile films (copyright issues with the Salinger estate haven’t helped). Camus’ text received one notable adaptation from Luchino Visconti in 1967, starring Marcello Mastroianni, but then and now, it feels more like an attempt to capitalize on Michelangelo Antonioni’s popular arthouse dramas about contemporary ennui than a true Visconti picture. By contrast, Ozon’s film boasts artistry and an entrenched perspective befitting Camus, presenting a monochrome world where, for the protagonist, existence itself has little color or meaning.

Ozon’s film presents the perfect marriage of director and text. Since breaking out in 2003 with Swimming Pool, the French filmmaker has released a consistent, if varied series of stylistically elegant films about the complexity of human identity. His work often explores the line of demarcation separating our public and private selves, resolving to fester there in disturbing thrillers (Double Lover, 2017) and entrenched dramas (Everything Went Fine, 2021) that explore moral ambivalence and hidden, even subconscious, agendas. Fittingly, Ozon’s adaptation of Camus embraces the many interpretive possibilities of the novella, leaving the viewer to question what it all means. Moreover, it prompts us to ask: Why this story, and why now? After all, Camus’ book has been criticized for embracing a colonialist worldview to serve the author’s exploration of social detachment and the absurdity of life. Ozon isn’t so uncritical of French colonial history and uses the scenario to interrogate how privilege fosters apathy.  

Benjamin Voisin stars as Meursault, an aloof Frenchman working at an office in French Algeria in the 1940s. Meursault sees only futility in most pursuits, though he shows up for work and carries on conversations with neighbors and acquaintances out of some vague acceptance of social responsibilities. He’s indifferent to his own life and self-interest, evidenced when his boss offers him the chance to run a new Paris office, and Meursault shows no ambition whatsoever. He doesn’t much care about family, either. When Meursault learns his mother has died in a nursing home, his boss asks how old she was. He guesses 60, but clearly isn’t sure. Based on the elderly folks in her nursing home, including his mother’s aged fiancé, it’s clear Meursault undershot her age by about 20 years. As for the funeral service, he tells an attendant that “there’s no point” in looking at the body. Meursault isn’t sentimental. He’s drawn to tangible, baseline experiences in the here and now; he enjoys sex, coffee, smoking, and food. He carries on a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder, last seen in Ozon’s 2023 farce, The Crime Is Mine), except he returns none of the love that Marie feels for him. How could she love such an empty shell of a man? Her love makes us question what she sees in him beyond his alluring physique. 

The fleeting emotions associated with human connections are of no concern to Meursault. Life, he says, has no greater purpose. We all live and die. Whether we live to 30 or 70, it makes no difference. He has no real friends, just two neighbors: an exploitative pimp, Raymond (Pierre Lottin), who beats one of his sex workers, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), and an older man (Denis Lavant) who beats his dog. Meursault takes no issue with their cruelty. His atheistic and apathetic worldview culminates when he shoots an Arab man, Djemila’s brother, Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani), seemingly on impulse, and goes on trial for the crime. The second half of the film follows the book, with Meursault’s rather sociopathic persona the subject of the prosecutor’s disdain, leading to his eventual conviction and execution in the meandering last section. The verdict comes after the court’s outright bafflement over Meursault, a living abyss. For such a man, his defense attorney remarks, “Everything is true, and nothing is true.” As a viewer, it’s difficult to care much about Meursault’s fate, and we certainly do not root for his release. The few scenes where Ozon allows Voisin to play the character with any passion involve Meursault confronting his mortality with the prison chaplain, who finds the condemned man devoid of both remorse and reflection beyond his anger at life’s insignificance. 

Ozon’s presentation is spare yet gorgeous, with stark black-and-white cinematography by Manu Dacosse and visual grain reminiscent of 1940s movies. There’s even a playful vintage newsreel introduction in the film’s first minutes, establishing the Casbah setting in Algiers. However, Ozon isn’t interested in creating a stylistic pastiche that commits to the period’s aesthetic (as in Steven Soderbergh’s 2006 effort, The Good German). The Stranger’s immersion into an almost stereotypical French arthouse style might border on parodic in another filmmaker’s hands. Instead, Ozon’s approach is an admirable, unflinching, and unironic embrace of this style, at once a throwback and a decidedly modern perspective. Furthermore, Ozon sets the picture in colonial times, long after postcolonial theorists and filmmakers—such as Claire Denis in Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009)— have thoroughly investigated the sociopolitical implications of colonialism. Ozon doesn’t over-emphasize the setting with anticolonial commentary; rather, he entrenches us in this perspective so that we might recognize its twisted implications. 

Indeed, Ozon’s film further condemns Meursault and his outward detachment by considering where Camus’ characters have directed their attention—to the white Frenchman, not the Arab victim or his family. Herein lies an imperialist prejudice, where subjectivity draws us to the white “criminal soul” instead of mourning his victims, who barely receive acknowledgment in court. Still, Ozon gives the victim a name, which is more than Camus offered readers (he referred to the victim as merely an “Arab”). The director also includes a scene with the victim’s sister, Djemila, standing over her brother’s grave. He acknowledges how Djemila and Moussa remain overlooked by the French, alive and mourning, or dead and forgotten. Ozon seems to question why the French have expended so much energy trying to understand a cipher and remorseless killer like Meursault, when there are innocent people more deserving of our attention. The viewer could apply the same questions to the systemic murder of any number of disregarded Muslim cultures from Gaza to Xinjiang, their deaths never fully contended with or mourned in Western eyes.

As a counterpoint, one might argue that the French colonizers are not so venal and systematically racist that they overlook Meursault’s crime. He is, in the end, put to death for murder. But one suspects that the court’s verdict results less from the crime itself than from their disgust with Meursault’s character. His dispassionate response to his mother’s death and disengagement from all matters that offend the court and its laws prove more offensive to them than the murder. There is little discussion about the loss of human life, only the nonconforming personality that took it—he behaves like an outsider who, from their colonizer’s perspective, is even worse than the Otherness of the Arab victim because he is a Frenchman who does not conform to the widely accepted precepts of French culture. The Stranger avoids any soapboxing about its social commentary on this point, and Ozon’s cryptic approach preserves Camus’ refusal to explain the lesson. The result is a challenging, fascinating, thorny film that leaves the viewer with a deep appreciation for its artistry and equivocations that preserve the timelessness of this enigmatic tale.