The Stranger Finally Gets a Name in François Ozon’s New Film

Albert Camus’s novella The Stranger is perhaps the most famous example of modern French literature, a well-worn touchstone for ideas about existentialism, sociopathology and the philosophy of the absurd. So it’s easy to forget that, when it first appeared on bookstands in 1942, “this novel was, itself, a stranger,” as Jean-Paul Sartre noted in his “Explication of The Stranger” (1947). Published in the midst of World War II, “It came to us from the other side of the Equator, from across the sea. In that bitter spring of the coal shortage, it spoke to us of the sun, not as of an exotic marvel, but with the weary familiarity of those who have had too much of it.” 

Though written in Paris, The Stranger is set in Algeria, where Camus was born and spent the first 27 years of his life. But the book’s spare and deliberately self-effacing style, and the fact that all its named characters are white French colonial citizens (or pied noirs), makes the novel putatively feel as though it could be set anywhere with a courtroom and a beach.

In François Ozon’s reverently faithful adaptation, which premiered on Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival, practically every word and gesture described in the story is enacted, in a stripped-down cinematic style befitting the prose. It is nonetheless a revelation to discover that Ozon’s Stranger drastically shifts the thematic focus of the original, transforming it into a saga of colonialism and imperialist alienation. Through little more than smart scene-setting, the film offers viewers a new understanding of the Algerian setting and Arab characters the novella so myopically excludes.

Shot in black and white, The Stranger’s most drastic renovation of its source material takes place at the beginning, with an introduction that resembles a mock 1940s newsreel describing Algiers. Occupied by French troops since 1830, Algiers was by this time heavily influenced by French colonization, with a sizable community of white pied noirs attempting to bestow Parisian influences on the North African city. The reel ends with an image of a elderly Berber man glowering at the camera, in pointed contrast to the newsreel’s sunny promise of “smiling locals ready to greet tourists.” From this, viewers are plunged into the alienated world of Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), who has just received a telegram notifying him that his mother has died. 

Voisin plays Meursault in the manner of a Bresson protagonist, a man without apparent qualities who is nonetheless fascinating for his mere physicality. His face is so often blank that the smallest twitched lip or furrowed brow feels revelatory, as though we may have just witnessed an emotional breakthrough. As in the novella, viewers quickly learn the basics of his daily routine: coffee in the morning, lunch at a local restaurant where he is known, a job at an import firm that he clearly cares little for. In Ozon’s version, he rushes so quickly to ask his boss for time off that he seems almost excited to attend his mother’s funeral, although the journey to the old folks home is long and he’s expected to keep vigil by the coffin until she’s buried.

By priming the film for a colonial critique at the start, Ozon’s simple recounting of the plot immediately begins turning up insights. Against the stark, arid backdrop of the Algerian countryside, the urgency of Meursault’s funerary voyage comes to seem like an odd transposition of French country life. When Meursault returns to Algiers and goes swimming the day after the funeral, it’s at a private beach for pied noirs. When he takes an old friend, Marie (Rebecca Marder) out to see a movie after swimming, a sign by the box office reads “ÉTABLISSEMENT INTERDIT AUX INDEGENES.” After he and Marie spend the night together, Meursault is woken up by the adhan, Islam’s morning call to prayer. None of these details are the type of thing Meursault would notice, having been raised in this environment as a member of the colonizing class. But Ozon is subtly persistent with his staging throughout the film, creating a texture of segregation and difference which gives new meaning to the fair-skinned Meursault’s status as an outsider.

The novella, of course, hinges on a crime charged by racial difference, even if it’s more often read as an act of modern anomie. On a trip to the seashore, Meursault and his friend Raymond encounter two Arab men, who Raymond says have been following him ever since he abandoned his ex-girlfriend Djamila. A fight breaks out and Raymond gets knifed by Djamila’s brother. Later, Merusault returns to the same strip of coastline, walking with Raymond’s revolver for protection. He encounters the man with the knife, and, in the midst of what might be heatstroke, fires five shots into his chest.

In the literary Stranger, only white characters are named; everyone else, including the man Meursault kills, is referred to as “Arabs” or “the Arab.” This may be a realistic aspect of the protagonist’s narration, but it’s one of the ways in which his perspective warps the story, effectively dehumanizing most of the people around him. The novella’s murder is famously ambiguous—when Meursault is tried for it later in court, the argument could equally be made that he shot in self-defense, or that this was an act of racially motivated violence, what today would be called a hate crime. The argument the prosecution makes instead – that Meursault’s lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral reveals him as “a criminal at heart” – has generally been taken at face value by readers and analysts of the novel, who treat the character as a riddle of human nature rather than something more environmentally conditioned.

The intricate alienation of the white colonial citizen, unnaturally privileged yet isolated from ancestral custom and tradition, is a condition that Camus knew well; indeed, it may have informed his conception of the philosophy of the absurd. “In a universe suddenly deprived of light and illusions, man feels himself a stranger. This exile is irrevocable, since he has no memories of a lost homeland and no hope of a promised land,” Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Ozon’s direct and focused adaptation of the author’s literary illustration of that philosophy does the near-impossible, breaking new ground on one of the most famous and highly regarded works of modern literature. 

In his airtight adaptation, Ozon recasts The Stranger as a colonial narrative, though  the nudges in this direction are small enough so as to not lose an ounce of the text’s philosophical weight. But two further innovations near the end of the film flesh out this aspect, giving viewers a glimpse of perspectives beyond the pale of the book. In the first, after Meursault is condemned to death and taken away, the film lingers in the courtroom, until only Marie and Djamila are left. Marie expresses her condolences for the murder of Djamila’s brother and asks her to forgive Meursault. “He doesn’t belong here, he should go home,” Djamila says. “This is his home. He was born here,” Marie replies. 

Later, after Meursault has spoken his last words, the film ends with a scene of Djamila alone on a cliff overlooking the beach. She is standing over a freshly dug grave, with a headstone in Arabic, for the man Meursault killed. For the first time, he’s given a name.

The Stranger is due to arrive in French cinemas on October 29.