François Ozon is not only a multi-filmmaker, but also a lot of filmmakers. In the past five years alone, the French director has so different fabrics as a queer coming-of-age story (“Sommer 85”), a euthanasia drama (“Everything went well”), a theatrical Rainer-Werner-Fassbinder adaptation (“Peter von Kant”), a crime comedy (“My fabulous crime”) and finally one of Claude Chabrol reminded Mixed thriller and family drama (“If autumn is approaching”).
Hardly a year later, Ozon is now venturing on a piece of world literature: “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, a main work of existentialism and one of the most printed French books of the 20th century. What exactly the “8 women” makers may have moved here and now about the novel, which was already filmed by the Italian cinema legend Luchino Visconti in 1967, is not always very clear in its adaptation. At the beginning there is a shift in perspective or at least expansion: Camus' 1942 novel also played in colonized Algeria, but only used this context as a background without explicitly making the colonial experience on the subject (the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud therefore even answered a kind of “counter -novel” from the perspective of the victim).
Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) meets everything and everyone around him with the same indifference.
The new film adaptation is initiated by archive material that celebrate the achievements of the foreign rule of the North African country through France – where formerly temporary, chaotic conditions in the capital Algier had previously prevailed, life blooms today. The fact that this flowering life was primarily reserved for the Europeans later reveals numerous “entering banned” signs that are explicitly aimed at the indigenous population. The national liberation front, which led a violent struggle against the colonial masters and made a significant contribution to the dissolution of the colonial system, is also mentioned in the recordings, although it has only formed a decade after the publication of “The Stranger”.
Now it is part of the good tone in a time of postcolonial discourses to at least refer to the complex political, social and cultural tensions. In addition, Ozon adheres to his template. The focus is on the young assistant Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), who is in prison in Algiers because of the murder of an Arab. In flashbacks we learn how to do this – what happens what happens is less important than the question of how Meursault behaves.
Life is pointless – so everything else
When the protagonists suffered the news of the death of his mother living in a nursing home, he reacts to it without any emotion. His indifference also does not get any breaks at the funeral, in which he learns that his mother still had a fiance in old age. Meursault does not or only delay in social rituals such as getting up at the funeral speech, less out of rudeness, but because he simply does not understand its meaning.
This is how he feels with everything else: “One life is as good as the other,” he replies when asked whether he would irritate him to move to Paris for a new item offered to him. When Marie (Rebecca Marder), with whom he begins a love affair, wants to know from him whether he love her, Meursault replies that this is of no importance anyway. And he also (at least initially) encountered his impending conviction because of a murder that apparently committed without rational motif. If life has no sense, why should anything make sense in it?
Marie (Rebecca Marder) falls in love with Voisin, although he himself rejects the concept of falling in love.
Meursault, played by Benjamin Voisin with worrying empty eyes, converts for two hours on the narrow line between the questioning of human -made order within an existence and pure nihilism perceived as an absurd. In court, his worldview becomes the actual subject of the indictment, which in turn raises questions about the relationship between individual freedom and social norm, objectifiable law and stipulated moral sensation. However, all of these ambivalences are already laid out in the novel, and Ozon dissolves so little from the topics and theses of his oversized starting material that “the stranger” sometimes seems rigid and impersonal.
This feeling is only underlined fat by the granular black and white images, which like the old logo of the production company Gaumont, which is preceded by the film, only once again. What is missing is not necessarily an update, but it is an approach with which Ozone actively adopts the fabric. After all, the film, hypnotically waving in his best moments, succeeds some sensual impressions, from bodies that touched the underground in the water, or Voisin, in which smoking can be as sexy as in times of Nouvelle Vague.
Conclusion: With “The Stranger”, François Ozon has been buttoned up one of the greatest French novels-and disappointed despite partly engaging atmosphere and some pretty black and white images as a little too much of the literature cinema, which is sticking to his starting material.
We saw “The Stranger” as part of the Venice Filmfest 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition.