François Ozon’s take on the Albert Camus classic 1942 novel The Stranger may well be the most definitive film adaptation yet. Ozon strides through every frame of his black-and-white film with a stiff and heavy step. Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, the protagonist in François Ozon’s cinematic adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (L’Étranger), matches the ambivalent tone of the classic character even when the movie doesn’t. Without belaboring the plot, Meursault is a quiet young man whose uneventful life is interrupted by the death of his mother. While Meursault performs the basic tasks of traveling to her retirement home and holding vigil, he doesn’t show any emotion. He instead remains expressionless. Nevertheless, he begins dating the beautiful Marie (Rebecca Marder), strikes up an ambivalent friendship with his abusive next-door neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin). The Stranger was screened yesterday at the American French Film Festival at the Directors Guild of America in West Hollywood.
In some respects, Ozon probably remains too faithful to the source material, lifting so much dialogue from the text that the film’s language feels overworked. Still, he does make a couple of inspired choices. The film begins with a newsreel that introduces us to the story’s Algiers setting as it might have been seen by many French eyes at their local theater. He also attempts to give the Arab characters defined traits and makes pains to show the prejudice they’re forced to confront. Those choices, of course, partly diverge from Camus’s intent.
Meursault’s disinterest in everyone around him, particularly the Arab people around him, is meant as a damning critique of the French way of not seeing these people of color. Ozon’s understandably modern impulse causes the film to be stuck between two aims: a loyalty to Camus and a desire to update the text for contemporary viewers. Ozon places the action in 1838 French-occupied Algeria, which is, by scholars’ estimations, years earlier than Camus’ setting. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) is thrown in prison for murdering an Arab. Rewind to earlier, when he requests a couple of days off at his office job to attend the funeral of his mother held at a countryside home for older adults. He smokes, takes his coffee with milk and dozes off during the wake, exhibiting no signs of grief. Meursault declines when the caretaker (Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat) offers to remove the coffin lid so he can see his mother once more.
Upon his return to Algiers, he runs into former colleague Marie (Rebecca Marder), and they spend the day at the beach and go to watch the Fernandel flick Le schpountz (i.e. a comedy) afterward. He also hangs out with his unscrupulous neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin), who is allegedly a pimp, and assists him by composing a letter in a plot to lure Raymond’s lover, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), over for a beating.
Raymond invites Meursault and Marie along to his pal’s beach cabin, and apparently they are tailed by Djemila’s brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) – in a nod to Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation – and two other Arab youths. A fight ensues, and Moussa pulls a knife and slashes Raymond. Later, upon seeing Moussa brandishing the blade again, Meursault shoots him four times with Raymond’s revolver.
Luchino Visconti first made L’Etranger in a film in 1967 – starring Marcello Mastroianni. It should probably have rendered all future attempts extraneous. But word is that Camus’ widow, Francine Faure, hated Visconti’s rendition and withheld it from the public eye after its initial release. While the pairing of Visconti and Mastroianni is hard to top, their film does register as rather dated. François Ozon was able to persuade Camus’ daughter Catherine to give her blessing for a new version.
Visconti’s and Ozon’s treatments are nearly verbatim. What truly separates them is the mood. Visconti placed heavy emphasis on the oppressiveness of the sweltering heat, an element absent in Ozon’s version. The latter seems less literal. It has that cool aloofness that has come to define Ozon’s oeuvre, which includes Under the Sand, Time to Leave and Young & Beautiful. There is no question that Ozon captures the aesthetic of Camus. The sense of detachment even manifests visually in Manu Dacosse’s monochromatic photography
Unlike Visconti, Ozon eschews voiceover narration, making Meursault even more of an enigma. Meursault is supposedly in his 30s. Mastroianni was a decade older when he took the part. With all due respect to Federico Fellini’s favorite leading man, the late-20-ish Voisin is more convincing as the directionless and impressionable Meursault. The character’s undoing is his lack of pretense, his obliviousness to the optics of his actions, which are perceived by others as antisocial. Mastroianni instead projected maturity and world-weariness.
Ozon alludes to seduction and gay panic as motives in the pivotal shooting. What is it about the mysterious Arab young man that draws Meursault back to the cove with a waterfall. That’s entirely plausible, though it’s hardly an improvement on the way Visconti presented it. Neither staging of the scene is really convincing, and perhaps that’s purposeful since you can’t really defend the indefensible. Voisin is also a dependable Meursault: He understands the emptiness of the character’s face and the searching in his eyes. He rarely overplays that aloofness but doesn’t seem to be hiding behind it either. There is no “soul” there and his only explanation in court is “the sun.”
The film’s greatest misstep is its reduction of Meursault to a brooding, one-dimensional sociopath– a portrayal that feels at odds with a possible interpretation of his character as undiagnosed autism. While critics often analyze him through philosophical or psychological frameworks, a contemporary reading might see him as on the autism spectrum. His mind so convoluted and non-responsive does not mean that Meursault is necessarily a nihilist or a racist. But that is a question one might raise about all the literature of the Twentieth Century.
