Writer and Director: François Ozon
Albert Camus’s novella L’Étranger looks fabulous in François Ozon’s carefully made film. Shot in black-and-white with plenty of shadows, Algiers is the coolly romantic bastion of French imperialism. Europeans flood the city’s streets, only occasionally broken up by Arab women wearing sleek white niqabs. The colonisers have made Algiers their own, a Mediterranean and cleaner Paris. However, the mainly unseen Arab population remains a threat to the last days of Empire. When Meursault kills one of them for no apparent reason, his attorney thinks his client will get off lightly.
Ozon is faithful to Camus’s text, celebrated for its absurdism and almost nihilistic viewpoint of the protagonist. Meursault appears to care for little in his life. When he receives the news that his mother has died in a rest home, a bus ride from the capital, he exhibits few emotions. He asks for time off work and is brusque with his boss when it’s granted. He calmly borrows a black tie and an armband from his friend, who works in a café. He gets the bus in the stifling heat, a layer of sweat sheening his face.
When he reaches the rest home, he doesn’t cry, and he doesn’t request that the coffin lid be lifted so that he can see his mother a final time. He shows no interest in meeting his mother’s friends, not even the old man, whom he discovers with only the slightest jolt of surprise was his mother’s fiancé. The old man is broken with grief; Meursault watches him dispassionately.
Back in the city, Meursault goes swimming in the sea and hooks up with Marie, a young woman he knows. They sunbathe seductively on a float before they go to the cinema to watch a French comedy film. They go back to his apartment to have sex. Sounds of the city echo up to his room: the whimpers of a dog being beaten by its owner, the tolling bells of the Christian church and the muezzin’s plaintive call for prayer.
Filmed so evocatively, Ozon’s film initially acts almost as an imperialist apology; the world seems perfect for an orientalist. Days are pleasantly ordered, and the afternoons are sultry, even in cinematographer Manuel Dacosse’s soft black-and-white. Composed, quiet, and unambitious, Meursault fits neatly into the city.
Perhaps, not unsurprisingly considering Ozon’s earlier works such as Swimming Pool (2003) and Young & Beautiful (2013), this retelling of the Camus story is a little too sexy. The camera loves Benjamin Voisin, who plays Meursault, and there are plenty of shots of him luxuriating on sunbeds and on sandy beaches; the camera traces his tanned skin as he lies in bed. Voisin’s handsomeness is sometimes distracting. Would we care so much about Meursault’s fate if a less good-looking actor had played the role? But Voisin captures the complete indifference of a man who doesn’t believe in love and sees marriage as a matter of course rather than any affirmation of mutual affection. There’s more than a hint of homoerotic desire between Meursault and the Arab he shoots.
Of course, Rebecca Marder’s Marie is beautiful too, but her neediness to settle down is far less attractive than Meursault’s aloofness. She stands by him after his arrest, turning up to the courtroom daily. The film loses its sweltering grip once Meursault is in his prison cell, and the conversations he has with the chaplain aren’t as convincing as in Camus’s prose. The prisoner can see Algiers through the window. He might not miss the city; but the viewer certainly does.
While Ozon’s movie is not quite a full postcolonial reading of the classic text, nor a detailed study of existentialism, The Stranger is an intoxicating mix of murder, sex and shadows. The Cure’s song Killing An Arab is an inspired choice for the closing credits.
The Stranger is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
