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L'Étranger
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What is the meaning of loving or killing, living or dying? Albert Camus’ classic 1942 novel (maybe too classic – even I, as a Catholic schoolkid in Australia in the mid 1970s, had to read it) asked these big, universal questions through the tale of Meursault, led by chance and circumstance to an act of murder in Algiers. Jailed and brought to trial, Meursault is presented as an immoral criminal – when, in his own mind, he’s simply a person of few words and undemonstrative emotions, indifferent to the values and beliefs of others. That’s what makes him a stranger or outsider (to cite the variant English translations of the title) to everyday life itself – subject to the kind of slow, disquieting unravelling that François Ozon has made his dearest subject since the earliest days of his prolific career. Benjamin Voison’s dry, sullen, matter-of-fact incarnation (intended by Ozon to be, ahem, ‘Bressonian’) of the Meursault role turns out to be far more ‘relatable’ than Marcello Mastroianni’s histrionic effort in Luchino Visconti’s odd 1967 adaptation of the same source. I found myself vigorously nodding whenever Meursault calmly stated – as he so often does! – the obvious: that people talk too much, that they care only about their own opinion, that conversational exchange is generally a useless waste of time and energy … In many respects, Ozon’s film is a scrupulously faithful adaptation of Camus’ novel – down to, at times, the smallest descriptive details. There are passages where it sinks into a dutiful and even dull Illustrated Classics mode – in which Ozon forgets the best lesson he ever imbibed from Luis Buñuel, that certain core motifs must be placed at the centre of a film’s network of images and sounds. But this version of Camus also allows itself the liberty of contemporary hindsight in its sidelong glimpses into Algerian culture of the 1930s (the opening newsreel montage), and the addition of a new character: Djamila (Hajar Bouzaouit), the grieving sister of the deceased Arab (who, unlike in the book, finally receives a name, Moussa Hamdani, inscribed on his tombstone in the final images). Is this a merely token touch of decolonialism? It’s hard to do much more with the fierce first-person structure of Camus’ book without radically reshaping it – and this, Ozon and recurrent co-writer Philippe Piazzo seem mostly reluctant to do (Visconti was actively prohibited from doing it by the Camus estate), beyond a little time-shifting. The film is also – for what this is worth – sexier and more sensual than the novel. The intimate relationship of Meursault and Marie (Rebecca Marder) is very discreetly rendered by Camus; Ozon juices this angle up, to striking effect. He also appears to take a fleeting line in the novel – Meursault’s recognition that, for one moment in his life, he wished to kiss a man – and sprinkles it as an ever-appearing, ever-vanishing queer ‘subtext’: not just in the lightly homosocial banter and vibe between Meursault and his male pals (played by Pierre Lottin and a stereotypically-cast, mannered-eccentric Denis Lavant), but also in the ECU POV views of the flesh of the man (played by Abderrahmane Dehkani) whom he is about to pop. (Ozon laughs off this ‘very North American’ interpretation in interviews, and declares he was aiming for a Sergio Leone effect in the murder scene.) Speaking of guns: one of Camus’ major influences derived from American hardboiled crime fiction; his book, in turn, had a decisive impact upon American film and literature, giving the noir genre its pronounced philosophical, fatalistic edge. (Hence the endless retrospective journalistic tagging of 1940s American cinema as ‘existentialist’, ho hum.) Ozon’s film closes the circle precisely by refashioning the ambience of Camus’ novel in the shadow of film noir. This reference is evoked, above all, in the superb black-and-white cinematography of Manu Dacosse (whose distinctive work has marked the films of Cattet & Forzani, such as Let the Corpses Tan [2017]). Fatima Al Quidiri’s music score takes a less familiar path, alternating modernistic, dissonant chords with sonically distant, age-old Arabic chants. Like many an anti-hero in the noir tradition (think of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street [1945]), Meursault is an ordinary guy who finds himself trapped by appearances and condemned by society’s assumptions about what constitutes normal behaviour. (In the mid 2020s, the character may find himself projected into, and misunderstood within, a different bindingly interpretive grid: the pop-DSM definition of autism.) The courtroom scenes here – a staple both of noir melodramas and recent French ‘social issue’ cinema (Anatomy of a Fall [2023], Saint Omer [2022], The Goldman Case [2023]) – have an observational density missing in the novel, where Meursault’s narrating subjectivity necessarily tends to the distracted, ambient and abstract. Ozon has long been the poet of bedrooms and bathrooms, and here, in L’Étranger’s second half, he reaches the one place where both co-exist in a single space: a prison cell – which is, simultaneously, a fine, classically existentialist metaphor for all humanity’s fate. Just one question: was the hip, send-you-out-of-the-theatre touch of The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” over the end credits really necessary? MORE Ozon: 8 Femmes, 5 x 2, Swimming Pool, Under the Sand © Adrian Martin 9 October 2025 |
