The Stranger – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Directors – Khaled Haffad, François Ozon
Writers – Albert Camus, François Ozon, Philippe Piazzo
Stars – Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin

In 1942, Albert Camus (1913-60) published his best-known work, L’Étranger, in then Nazi-occupied Paris.  Algerian by birth, but to this day still regarded as French, the country of his birth and of which he wrote remained under French control until 1962.  Camus was what was known as a pied noir and, possibly like many, felt neither at home in France nor in Algeria.  The sense of alienation – not from here and not from anywhere else either – infuses both Camus’s novella and Ozon’s recent interpretation, one of a small number over the decades.

Beginning with a visual/cinematic homage to the great Bogart / Bergman vehicle Casablanca, also and significantly 1942, the ever-stylish Ozon deftly creates the pace and feel of Michael Curtiz’s directional style.  Occasionally employing an almost lugubrious pace, he presents a faithful and measured evocation of Camus’s master work and a sensitive feeling for time and place.  If not quite the hyper-stylishness of The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime, 2023), there is a wonderful evocation of colonial Algeria, with judicious documentary footage, which acts almost as a travelogue for the good life of the colonial settler.  Camus’s novella makes no mention of any Algerian by name, one of the many issues that challenge his fans and critics to this day.  While the French characters have actual names, the local, ‘the other’, is indicated by simply the Arab, the Muslim or the indigene.

Ozon, on the other hand, gives names to some of his Algerian characters, notably the prostitute Djemila.  He also underlines the historic scant regard for the native Algerian, implicit in the text, through details difficult to accurately capture in writing, such as the particular sound of the athan, the Islamic call to prayer.  Recalling apartheid South Africa or the southern states of the USA in the same period, we spot signs at the smart terrace-side coffee shops, ‘pas d’indigene.’ Eighty-four years after the novella was written, it is possible to bring the benefit of time and hindsight to Camus’s text.  We never really know what angle Camus is taking. Ozon is more pointed in highlighting French shortcomings, and the anachronism of its attempt to rule.  Through the main character, Meursault, the stranger/outsider of the title, Camus emphasised the pointlessness of life itself.  Knowing what we know now and the legacy of French colonial occupation around the world, it is all the more complex. We know of the consequences from Vietnam, the Middle East and North Africa. Ozon is empowered to highlight, albeit in a subtle and never heavy-handed way, the absurdity of French occupation and even more so the absurdity of its contempt for other cultures and traditions if not for occupation itself.  The courtroom trial is one of the liveliest stretches in the film – indeed recalling the spark and debate in a range of French courtroom dramas of late. The judge appears almost benign, and we can presume that the all-male French jury will acquit the non-hero Meursault.   He faces his end not because of his crime but because he will not conform to the expectations of the French state, le grand état. For teenage eyes, Meursault is the misunderstood rebel without a cause, an Algerian James Dean perhaps. By contrast, through adult eyes, he comes across more as a sullen prat who needs a slap. Ozon appears to capture this quality all too accurately.   While on one level acutely faithful to Camus’s novella, on the other hand, there are slight shifts and tilts to pander to the current socio-political consensus, perhaps even unwittingly.  While beautifully shot and acted, it behoves all viewers to dip back into the original 1942 text.