In The Stranger François Ozon captures the many ambiguities of Albert Camus’s novel

Director François Ozon’s new film adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger (The Outsider, 1942) confronts a considerable task: turning a brief, philosophical novel into a cinematic experience.

Though the book is short, it is dense and readers often discover it requires multiple readings. Camus’s spare prose conceals profound questions about morality, society and human existence. Translated into over 75 languages with millions of copies sold, The Outsider has inspired stage, screen, radio and even graphic and manga adaptations. It has long been a set text in schools and universities, often perplexing young readers, just as it did a young Ozon. This film offers an invitation to return and reflect on Camus’ work.

The story follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French-Algerian office worker living in Algiers. The novel famously opens with the death of his mother, whose funeral he attends with apparent emotional detachment. He begins a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), who formerly worked in the same office and becomes involved with Raymond (Pierre Lottin), a neighbour entangled in a violent dispute.

Meursault’s life changes dramatically when he shoots a young Arab man on a sun-drenched beach. The act leads to his arrest and the second part of the novel focuses on his imprisonment and trial. Throughout, Meursault remains a detached observer of the absurdity of existence and the moral expectations of society.

Ozon’s adaptation closely follows this narrative while expanding certain perspectives giving the film its own vitality and richness.

Camus and the challenges of adaptation

In a recent Curzon audience Q&A, Ozon observed that this is a novel every reader has already visualised and staged in their own mind. The director faced not only the expectations of readers’ imagined versions of the story but also the iconic stature of Camus himself.

Born into a poor French settler family in Algeria, afflicted by tuberculosis, Camus rose to become a journalist, playwright, actor, philosopher, member of the French Resistance, world-famous novelist and Nobel laureate (in 1957). His death at the age of 46 in a fatal car accident little more than two years later, with an unused train ticket to Paris in his pocket, added a mythic aura to his life and work.

Shot compellingly in black and white, Ozon’s film moves fluidly between the opening 1930s archive images of Algiers to the film’s recreated streets and natural landscapes with their play of light and shadow. The heat of the sun, the glare of the sea and the tactile presence of sand are central to the story, while also reflecting Camus’s own love of Algeria’s natural riches.

Camus described the story as both abstract and intensely physical – rooted in flesh and heat. Ozon’s film captures that tension between the intellectual and the sensory.

The title of the novel sets up the ambiguities of interpreting and adapting it. Published as The Outsider in the UK and The Stranger in the US, both titles seemingly settle the possibilities of Meursault’s status.

In French, “étranger” may mean stranger, foreigner or outsider – a multiplicity Ozon preserves in his adaptation. Voisin, incarnating Meursault’s stillness and silences on screen, moves between these roles. Among the French quarter’s neighbours, cafes and small businesses, he is just another man. Algerian passers-by, merely glimpsed here, are the strangers, foreigners, outsiders.

Among the Arab prisoners Meursault is imprisoned with, he is suddenly “the foreigner”. The film traces his inexorable shift from detached observer to condemned outsider. The confrontation with the chaplain, a climactic moment in the novel, is key to Ozon’s own vision. Here, Meursault refuses conventional consolation, embodying the “rebel” of Camus’s later philosophical work.

Reclaiming Camus’s ambiguities

The colonial context of L’Etranger has often been politically contested. Camus’s unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994) was found at the scene of his death. It reflects his position on Algeria (and on poverty, class and education), which is more complex than trial by the political convictions of various critics allows.

Camus’s detachment from Algerian nationalist movements, along with his choice not to name Arab characters in his fiction (or to avoid them altogether), drew sustained criticism from the French Left and Algerian nationalists in the 1950s and 60s. His vision of a multicultural Algeria – seen by some as utopian and by others as implicitly racist – was later criticised by postcolonial scholars as well. However, these ambiguities are inseparable from Camus’s literary and moral vision and his lived experience.

Ozon’s adaptation speaks to contemporary audiences by giving form to these ambiguities. By expanding the presence of his lover Marie, Ozon provides subtle insights into Meursault, a man condemned because he doesn’t play the game and refuses to lie, as Camus later described him in a 1955 American edition of the novel. Ozon also gives agency to the murdered man’s sister Djemila (also nameless in the novel). These female performances provide the film’s emotional centre.

The film’s careful attention to Algeria, both past and present, meanwhile, reframes The Stranger as a story not just of one man, but of a society. Following the bloody civil war in 1990s Algeria, Camus was “recuperated” by Algerian dissidents against the rise of fundamentalism and reclaimed by new generations of Algerian writers. The final scene of the film honours the murdered “Arab” with the name Moussa, which has been taken from Kamel Daoud’s knowing re-telling, Meursault, Contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation; 2012).

In doing so, Ozon takes his own place in reclaiming Camus’s moral fable in all its ambiguities. The Stranger retains Camus’s philosophical challenge: to confront the absurdity of existence without surrendering to despair.

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Debra Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.