Some well-known and/or much-loved novels have proved notoriously difficult to portray onscreen. Books, for example, that rely on the internal thoughts of their heroines or heroes, such as Jane Austen’s Emma or Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves rarely receive the cinematic adaptation they deserve. A very different kind of novel, where the reader is not allowed access to a protagonist’s motivation or inner thoughts, has also proved tricky to film, with Albert Camus’s 1942 work L’Étranger (The Stranger) marking perhaps the Everest of unfilmable novels. That has not stopped the most chameleon-like of directors, François Ozon, however, from trying.
Meursault, the novel’s lead character, as every former student of French literature will tell you, is a man seemingly alienated from all emotion, whether it be the lack of grief he feels at his mother’s death and funeral, of real empathy with his girlfriend Marie, or of a sense of outrage at the physical abuse of a woman by his neighbor, Raymond. The most flagrant example is the coldness with which he shoots an unnamed “Arab” (the abused mistress’s brother) dead on an Algerian beach.
Ozon makes a valiant effort to follow the details of the novel (thereby ensuring that all future French schoolchildren studying the text will be made to see the movie version). Even though Camus’s 80-year-old daughter Catherine, who gave Ozon permission to make the film, apparently disapproved of the director’s choice to give prominence (and names) to the indigenous Algerian characters in the film, it does feel appropriate and right in this age to acknowledge the cruelty of colonialism in some meaningful way: the response of the murdered man’s sister is shown as she attends Meursault’s trial, and the film ends with her visiting her brother’s grave, where, unlike in the novel, he is given a name.
The success of the film stands or falls on the choice of the actor playing the central character. Benjamin Voisin, who starred in Ozon’s 2020 film Été 85 and cemented his reputation through his César-winning role in Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions Perdues (2021), is impeccably unreadable as Meursault. If all the other characters are somewhat one-dimensional next to the dominance of Meursault in both book and film, they are well played, with notable performances by Rebecca Marder as Marie and Swann Arlaud as the priest who visits and fails to convert Meursault in jail.
However, Camus’s text is not helped by Ozon’s decision to focus the camera lovingly on every contour of Voisin’s face and body, aided by the black-and-white photography of the stunningly beautiful Algerian landscape. The movie gives instead the impression of a two-hour-long commercial for a men’s fragrance, a fragrance that I would certainly like to buy but which does not help me appreciate the sense of alienation and the absurd that the author is surely aiming to explore.
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Great review – particularly the somewhat acerbic end comments. I’m still curious to see the film, but will no doubt be thinking of Johnny Depp and Sauvage during certain closeups!
Wow, I wasn’t expecting the fragrance reference but it certainly rang a bell. There is something to say about ambitious failed films, they are sometimes more endearing than predictable ones. In effect, Ozon gave us the funk of a closed room, the gun-flint of an overbearing sun, a hint of iodine from receding waves and some unpleasant base notes from an overheated courtroom. Any VC’s out there? Let’s create a sexy bottle and find a nose to put these scents together. I smell a hot bests-seller: L’Etranger.