Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) is a man of little words and fewer deeds. He idles away, smoking, brooding and gazing at the world with zen-like detachment, barely shedding a tear at his mother’s funeral or lifting a hand against injustice. Then he kills a man – an act whose hazy motivation has fueled debate in classrooms and book clubs since Albert Camus published “The Stranger” in 1942.
François Ozon, by contrast, is anything but inert. For decades he has worked at a relentless clip, writing, directing, producing and promoting a new film each year, now bringing his latest to Venice. And yet entrusting France’s most-read modern novel to its most prolific filmmaker is less obvious than it first appears. Camus’ work endures precisely because of its elusive (and allusive) quality – its celebrated interiority more conducive to interpretation than to adaptation.
Ozon’s canniest move is to fold decades of reappraisal into his own version, staying faithful both to the text and to the long discourse it has inspired. Just don’t expect a listless affair: This is a more sensual update, grounded in the one worldly pleasure that pierces Meursault’s armor of indifference. (One can faintly hear the beleaguered Fritz Lang of “Contempt” caterwauling about the concession: “It’s existentialism … with sex!” What can I say, the formula works.)
So too does Ozon’s ongoing partnership with Benjamin Voisin, first struck in 2020’s “Summer of 85” and now put to radically different use. His Meursault plays less like a Gallic Tom Ripley than a fatalist ideologue – carried away by the unbearable lightness of being, and duty-bound to speak that truth, whatever the cost. His only conviction is that everything’s phooey, and as a clear-eyed witness to the colonial apartheid of 1930s French Algeria, he’s not entirely off-base.
While Ozon hews closely to the original narrative – tracking Meursault across two chapters, first drifting into an impassive romance with typist Marie (Rebecca Marder), then standing trial for a murder the colonial courts might otherwise ignore were it not for his destabilizing lack of affect –“The Stranger” shades this world with a moral indictment absent from Camus’ text. At best it was latent in the original novel, which spoke in a 1940s vernacular, reducing all locals to the label of “Arabs,” even as it later inspired a wealth of post-colonial reappraisals and companion works, most notably Algerian author Kamel Daoud’s much-acclaimed “The Meursault Investigation.”
The filmmaker borrows from both Camus and Daoud, placing his hypocrisy-averse protagonist against the larger hypocrisy of an apartheid regime, while carving out more room for an Algerian perspective. Two previously anonymous figures – siblings Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) and Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) – are now granted first names and inner lives, though the narrative still casts them as victims: she of Meursault’s brutish neighbor, Sintès (Pierre Lotin), and he, of course, of Meursault himself. Yet Ozon uses these familiar plot points to deepen the psychology of his antihero. When Meursault gazes passively at the world around him, what else can he perceive but a justice system tilted in his favor — until, all of a sudden, it isn’t.
One can sense Ozon’s creative glee in cracking open a sacred text, yielding a film that plays like a handsome reissue with his notes and asides scribbled in the margins. At the pivotal moment, when a half-drunk, sun-dazed Meursault stumbles onto Moussa on the beach, the two men appraise each other almost tenderly, or at least with a reciprocal desire that echoes Ozon’s sensual instincts, folding in the queer re-readings long attached to the novel. The encounter jolts us – especially given Meursault’s evident eagerness for Marie – and perhaps it jolts him too. Maybe that’s why, with the sun bearing down, the Frenchman pulls out a gun.
Or maybe not. Maybe we can never really know, least of all when trying to impose logic under the harsh light of a legal system forever searching for order in chaos. Arrested for killing a second-class citizen, Meursault finds not his crime but his very affect on trial. Sound familiar? If the echo to “Anatomy of a Fall” feels faint, Ozon drives the point home with a sly cameo from that film’s “Hot Lawyer,” Swann Arlaud, a metatextual wink to a novel whose intellectual legacy remains as agile as ever.
And yet, for all its cerebral flourishes, “The Stranger” offers no shortage of simpler pleasures: the coal-and-ash textures conjured by DP Manu Dacosse, the unforced intimacy between Voisin and Marder, the welcome turns from Gallic stalwarts like Arlaud and Leos Carax mainstay Denis Lavant. Taken individually, they lend color and heft; taken together, they shape one of Ozon’s richest and most satisfying works in years — that rarest of literary adaptations, one that honors a foundational text precisely by finding something new to say.
