Albert Camus, estranged
Albert Camus’s 1942 debut novel, L’Étranger, remains one of the three most widely read stories in France, along with Les Misérables and Le Petit Prince, at least according to AI. Teenagers are impressed by its brutal simplifications about the absurdity of life, but then do not reread it as adults. Thus, it still commands a peculiar cultural sway.
Luchino Visconti made a faithful, colourful film of the novel, Lo Straniero, in 1967, spavined by the casting as Meursault of Marcello Mastroianni, by then in his mid-forties, handsome but inappropriately charming and Italian, in a role that might much better have been played by Alain Delon as originally announced – no less good-looking, ten years younger, French and far chillier.
Since then, a film of the novel has been made in Turkey in 2001 (Yazgi, or Fate) and the story significantly retold in 2013 in a novel called The Meursault Investigation by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. François Ozon decided to adapt L’Étranger, his 25th feature, while trying to make an original film about an alienated young man. He read the book again for the first time in 40 years and was struck both by how it resonated with his concerns and how invisible the Arabs were in the novel, before discovering that the rights were again available through Camus’s daughter, Catherine.
The film he has made, the result of a series of incisive creative decisions, is much better than Visconti’s. As the novel is narrated in the declarative first person, the obvious temptation is to use the idlest form of literary adaptation, voiceover, extensively. Ozon resists this almost entirely, using it only twice, including just after Meursault commits the murder (“I knew I’d upset the balance of the day”), making these interventions potent. Otherwise, we observe; we’re not told. There are long speechless sequences and to most questions Meursault just replies that he doesn’t know.
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The cinematography, by Manu Dacosse, is in ravishing monochrome, which both transmits the starkness of the Algerian light wonderfully and distances us historically from the scene. Ozon reinforces this effect with opening documentary footage of Algiers in the 1930s. Due to the tensions between France and Algeria, filming there was not practicable; Tangier had to be used as a stand-in, but it works excellently. The soundtrack, by the Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri, bridges epochs too, by combining traditional Arabic elements with electronica.
The casting is terrific. Meursault is always going to be a problem: he is not just unsympathetic but unreadable, a blank page. To keep us fascinated, he needs to be remarkably attractive. Benjamin Voisin (star of Ozon’s 2020 film Summer of 85) is still in his twenties and so irresistibly good-looking that we follow him unfailingly, however wooden his behaviour. As Marie, the girl he picks up at the beach the day after his mother’s funeral, Rebecca Marder is luminous too, her love for him much more explicit than in the novel. Around this pair, some gloriously repulsive French character actors have been assembled too – Pierre Lottin as the fatefully nasty Raymond Sintès, Denis Lavant as the demented dog-owner Salamano, Swann Arlaud (the compromised lawyer in Anatomy of a Fall) as the priest whom Meursault rejects in prison.
So far, so true to source. Where Ozon has firmly corrected or, as he prefers to put it, contextualised, or as we might better say, updated, Camus is in his heartless treatment of women and Algerian Arabs in the story. Marie’s role is enhanced, as is that of the sister of the man who is killed; she is given a name, Djamila, and appears (anachronistically) in the court scenes.
Camus’s position on Algerian independence was controversial in his lifetime, let alone today: “an incapacitated colonial sensibility” (Edward Said). He spoke no Arabic and no Arab ever speaks in his fiction, as Conor Cruise O’Brien pointed out. He had no time for religion. He never accepted Algerian independence, maintaining that the Muslims were “making insane demands for an independent Algerian government, where the French will be considered as foreigners unless they convert to Islam”.
Ozon counters these disreputable opinions by carefully locating the story in its colonial context and hinting that it foretells the conflict to come. Camus always precisely denied that. So here’s an accomplished Stranger for today, the story we wish he had written, rather than the one he himself maintained he had.
“The Stranger” is in cinemas on 10 April
[Further reading: Jim Jarmusch and the parental pleasure principle]
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall
