A staple of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of French literature classes worldwide, the 1942 novel L’Etranger (The Outsider) by the Nobel Prize-winning Franco-Algerian novelist Albert Camus has finally made it into mainstream film with a new adaptation by French director Francois Ozon opening in Paris in November.
While the book has been adapted for cinema before, notably in the Italian director Luciani Visconti’s 1967 version Lo Straniero with Marcello Mastroianni, one of Italy’s best-known actors at the time, Ozon’s version seems set to reach larger audiences.
Not only is there the distinction of the film’s directorial and acting team, leading French director Ozon and up-and-coming actor Benjamin Voisin replacing Visconti and Mastroianni, but there has also been growing interest in this Algerian-themed French novel in recent years, which like Camus’s others takes place in his native Algeria.
Even those who have not read L’Etranger or have distant memories of reading it at school will likely know the famous opening lines, spoken by the protagonist Meursault. “Mother died today, or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure,” he says in his deadpan way in lines that have led to a storm of commentary. Readers worldwide have seen in him the kind of existentialist individual patented by Camus, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and others in France after the Second World War.
Haunted by questions of motive, meaning, and commitment in an opaque and unfeeling world, L’Etranger has certainly been a hit with readers, with the novel believed to have sold at least 10 million copies in different editions and to have been translated into over 60 languages. However, with the fading of interest in European existentialism over the past few decades it has been another aspect of it that has most exercised readers in recent years – namely its Algerian setting.
While Meursault may have difficult relations with his family, he has even more difficult ones with Algeria’s Arab and Berber population, which during the period of French colonial rule that ended after the Algerian Independence War in the 1950s was relegated to second-class status. Blundering through some kind of existential crisis, Meursault shoots and kills an unnamed Algerian outside Algiers, and though the gesture is invested with a range of possible meanings, none of them, for the novel’s critics, touches enough on the French colonial domination that is the real background to his action.
No one who has read the rest of Camus’s output can be in any doubt about his affection for the land of his birth and his pain at seeing it descend into violence during the Independence War against France. His last novel, Le Premier Homme, unfinished at the time of his death, is an autobiographical account of growing up in French Algiers, and his journalism and other writings from the 1950s bear witness to his attempts to find an exit from French rule in Algeria that would go at least some way towards calming the fears of both sides.
But the fact remains that for Meursault Algiers is a European city, and his existential crises, alienating him from those around him, are experienced among his European friends. Arab Algiers and Algeria exist only as a kind of native décor. It was probably this aspect of the novel that the francophone Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud was getting at in his Meursault, contre-enquête (reviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2013), a rewriting of Camus’s novel in which he puts not Meursault’s existentialist meanderings but the experiences of Algeria’s otherwise silent majority at the centre.
Perhaps no one should expect an existentialist novelist to have a real concern for the lives of other people, since this is a philosophy that naturally tends towards the investigation of the individual. It is a very unpromising starting point for the analysis of the collective. Perhaps Camus was destined to feel as much concern for the latter as Sartre did in his novel La Nausée, where it is not Algerian Algiers that functions as the backdrop to existentialist questioning but provincial France, where the local population are presented as either sheep-like in their docility or the protagonist’s unwitting enemies.
Even so, for many postcolonial writers, it is Meursault’s action in killing the unnamed Algerian in the first part of L’Etranger that naturally draws attention rather than the relationship he does or not have with his late mother.
Film version: Ozon opens his film account of L’Etranger not with Meursault’s famous words about his mother but instead with what he says on entering the prison where he is to be held before his trial – “I have killed an Arab.”
“On the day of my arrest they put me in a biggish room with several other prisoners, mostly Arabs. They grinned when they saw me enter and asked me what I’d done. I told them I’d killed an Arab” is how Meursault describes this in the novel. “One of them explained to me how to lay out a sleeping mat by rolling up one end to make a kind of bolster,” he adds, in an action also meticulously reproduced in the film.
Soon, however, the order of events returns to Camus’s script, presenting Meursault’s bus journey from Algiers, where he has an unfulfilling office job, to Marengo (today Hadjout) some 78 km to the west of the capital where his mother’s funeral is to take place. “The old people’s home is at Marengo, some 50 miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back by tomorrow evening,” Meursault says in the novel in events reproduced exactly in Ozon’s screenplay (written with Philippe Piazzo).
Ozon, now in his late fifties, came to prominence some two decades ago with his film Huit femmes, a kind of kitsch re-make of work by the classic Hungarian-American director George Cukor, and since then he has made other films that have been both well-regarded on the French and international arthouse circuit and have also enjoyed considerable commercial success.
His 2012 film Dans la maison (In the House) is one of his best-known and, for many, possibly his best to date, presenting characteristic themes of sexual ambiguity and an ambivalence towards or subversion of certain societal or familial norms. He has previously worked with storylines provided by others, almost always B-list writers, and he has shown himself attracted to re-reading or subverting established genres, drawing inspiration from thrillers, Hollywood comedies, police procedurals, and classic musicals and often mixing and matching motifs from them in a single film.
This is the first time that he has adapted a major work of literature for the screen, however, and many French filmgoers may have been uncertain about what to expect. Would he produce a kitschy re-reading of existentialist themes, earnestly pursued in the 1950s, but seen ironically today, or would he riff on the possibilities contained within Camus’s novel – a legal procedural as well as an existentialist monodrama – or go for a costume-drama reconstruction of French Algeria during its final decades?
Many must have doubted that Ozon would be attracted to a post-colonial version of Camus’s novel along the lines of Daoud’s re-reading.
While Ozon’s film version of L’Etranger may not please all viewers, particularly those who may have wanted to see something more obviously politically engaged, what he has produced is a fluent and eminently satisfying film version of Camus’s novel that is faithful to what the author wrote. In so doing, he has not ignored possibilities for other interpretations, but he has subordinated them to his own vision of the text.
The film is made in black and white, giving it a pleasing period feel and perhaps almost making audiences believe that what they are watching is a historical document. Some newsreel photography of Algeria in the 1950s, also in black and white, has been incorporated into the finished cut, but this has been kept to a minimum.
The effect can sometimes be a bit like leafing through old magazines, with the eye lingering on images that hover somewhere between documentary and advertising. The beach scenes between Meursault and his fiancée Marie in particular look like something out of old copies of glossy magazines, with images often looking as composed, and as sensual, as those produced in a fashion shoot.
Voisin, playing Meursault, has been given the almost impossible task of rendering this obsessionally self-absorbed character on screen. While Meursault narrates Camus’s novel, which is told throughout in the first person, he is a detached witness or spectator to the action rather than a participant in it, presumably saying something about his scepticism regarding the lives of others and the value systems they live by.
Voisin solves the problem of how to play him by presenting Meursault as all handsome surface and no depth. Rather like a fashion model, he looks as if he is posing as Meursault rather than acting him, inviting the audience to remember Meursault’s own perception that he is playing a part scripted by others, being invited to entertain feelings he does not feel, whether distress at the death of his mother or remorse at his senseless, or at least apparently motiveless, killing of the Algerian.
Sometimes it is possible to feel that Ozon is being slyly knowing, as Voisin, playing Mersault playing Meursault, strikes poses that could be snipped out of other French films of a certain type, with Meursault and Marie, effectively rendered by Rebecca Marder, staring moodily at one another as he takes another drag on an obligatory cigarette. Meursault and his friends appear in a succession of bistrot scenes, all checked tablecloths and pichets of vin rouge, with a hearty patron then appearing to recommend the plat du jour to customers looking and behaving like French people in films.
But there are enough striking cameo roles to drag the film back down to earth, with effective performances from characters given little scope in the novel to be themselves under Meursault’s sceptical gaze but filling out in the film to exist more as people in their own right. Well-known character actor Denis Lavant as Meursault’s neighbour Salamano, perpetually battling with his recalcitrant dog, is especially good, and Pierre Lottin as local tough Sintès, not very plausible in the novel but necessary in order to explain how Meursault finds himself killing the Algerian, gives a solid performance by the side of which the protagonist can appear washed out.
The killing of the Algerian takes place at the end of the first part of the novel, Meursault saying that he was blinded by the midday sun on the beach where it takes place. “Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged at my palm. With that crisp, whip-crack sound, it all began. I shook off the sweat and the clinging veil of light. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.”
Needless to say, we never find out why Meursault did what he did, but the court scene in the film, well-realising the one in the novel, runs through the possibilities. The film is full of intelligent asides, some scripted and some not scripted by Camus. Marie is given a fuller role than she has in the novel, and there is a plausible feel to the film’s reconstruction of colonial Algeria.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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