François Ozon is a peculiar filmmaker. The French director’s output is as prolific (25 films in nearly 30 years) as it is full of odd and sometimes puzzling quirks. He has done a riff on La Piscine (Swimming Pool) and an erotic thriller-tinged take on Vertigo (Double Lover). He remade Fassbinder’s Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Peter von Kant) and Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (Frantz). Now comes Ozon’s latest film, The Stranger, his adaptation of Albert Camus’ canonic novella of existentialism and emotionlessness in French Algeria. The task of bringing The Stranger to the screen has already been tried twice: once by Luciano Visconti in 1967 (with the main character of Meursault played by Marcello Mastroianni), and the other time in 2001 by Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz. So what is it that Ozon can add?
Well, for starters, he gives the narrative’s Arab victim (unnamed in Camus’ book) an actual name. It might only be revealed at the end, and it certainly isn’t a concept that has never been done before (Algerian novelist Kamel Douad did so with his 2013 reinterpretation, The Meursault Investigation). Nevertheless, it’s a choice that feeds into what’s probably the most interesting thematic aspect of Ozon’s update, as French-Algerian tensions are brought into the foreground. The film accomplishes this immediately with a newsreel describing how Algeria has been made more “civilized” (i.e. more French) by its colonizers. Other reminders, like a “No Indigenes Allowed” sign at a cinema or National Liberation Front graffiti, only function to make those underlying tensions more apparent.
Meanwhile, we first see Frenchman Meursault (a very good Benjamin Voisin, co-lead in Ozon’s Summer of 85) being hauled into a crowded prison. Asked by an inmate why he is there, he simply replies: “I killed an Arab.” It all began when he received a telegram announcing the passing of his mother. While he travels to the rest home where he sent her for the funeral, Meursault notably shows no emotion toward his mother’s death. He doesn’t even want to see the body, saying simply, “There’s no point.” And when he returns the day after, he immediately goes back to his usual routines as if nothing had happened. He reunites with Marie (Rebecca Marder, a beguiling presence) and begins an affair with her. He also runs into his brutish male neighbors — the elderly Salamano (Denis Lavant) and Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin). Widely rumored to be a pimp, Sintès abuses his mistress, an Arab woman named Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), which Meursault helps to enable with a letter. When her brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) seeks revenge, it leads to a fateful moment on the beach.
Ozon’s script (which remains very faithful to Camus’ story) shows Meursault to be an apathetic and detached individual leading a passive existence. He doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral; he doesn’t laugh at Fernandel’s Le Schpountz. When Marie suggests getting married or his boss suggests moving to Paris, he doesn’t have any strong emotional reaction. A foreigner in this country, an outsider in this society when it comes to emotional expectations, it’s as if Meursault is mimicking the violent, indifferent behaviors around him — not just from people like Sintès, but the colonizing French, who imposed inferior legal status on the indigenous Algerian population.
As with most of Ozon’s films, the craft is undeniably polished and skilful, even if the rest of the film smacks of the merely competent. The score from Fatima Al Qadiri (Atlantics) offers the most intriguing aspect of the whole game, successfully hinting at the dark undercurrent of Meursault’s unnerving demeanor. Manu Dacosse’s sumptuous black-and-white imagery, meanwhile, helps to highlight the sensuality that exists between Meursault and Marie, as well as the incessant heat beating them down.
The primary problem with The Stranger, then, is that its pacing drags considerably in the second half, to the extent that any momentum is slowly snuffed out. After the murder and subsequent trial (where the prosecution focuses more on the funeral tears Meursault didn’t shed), a conversation with a priest (Swann Arlaud) reveals our main character’s fatalism, his belief in the absurdity and pointlessness of human existence, which those familiar will know is crucial to the reading of the Camus’ work, as well as Ozon’s film. Yet as we reach this scene — where sense is to be made of a senseless act — The Strangers nosedives into over-explanatory exposition and repetitive point-making, leaving Ozon nothing else to do but crawl to his conclusion. It’s an ending so flat and drained of vitality that viewers are left to feel nothing but profoundly detached. The irony.
Published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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