The Stranger: Francois Ozon adapts the impossible literary classic, Albert Camus’ L’etranger

Albert Camus’s L’etranger (The Stranger) is one of the seminal books of not just French literature but global storytelling.

Published in 1942, the small novella has for eight decades been hailed as one of the best known works of existentialism, a rival to Jean-Paul Sartre in significance, tucked into the backpacks of every first-year philosophy student, and famously, an unadaptable tome.

Only two filmmakers have tried. Italian master Luchino Visconti in 1967 and Turkish filmmaker Zeki Demirkubuz in 2001. Visconti’s effort has served as something of a cautionary tale for almost 60 years.

“Visconti had Camus’s widow on the set and she asked him to follow exactly the book page by page, word by word,” French filmmaker Francois Ozon told The Nightly. “When you make a literal adaptation of a book, it doesn’t work. You have to accept the idea of betrayal, you have to have a new vision.

“You have to make something else with the material, and it might be a masterpiece but you have to try to make another masterpiece.

“Visconti was very sad (about his film’s failure) and he was conscious it didn’t work. I realised, because of his experience and what he said in interviews (about it), I had to have my own vision.”

That’s exactly what Ozon has created, his own film version of the unadaptable book – L’etranger, which debuted last year at the Venice Film Festival and then went on to be nominated for four Cesar Awards (the French version of the Oscars), winning one.

Ozon’s film is lush and stark, a beautiful visual portrait of Camus’s story about Meursault, a young French man in 1940s French-Algeria, who is put on trial for killing an Arab man, and whose guilt or innocence seems to hang on evidence of his emotional detachment to his mother’s death.

Ozon approached Camus’s daughter, who had previously rejected other filmmakers who wanted to take on the film.

“I didn’t want to make a film of 1942, but a film of today with the eyes of 2026,” Ozon explained. “So, I changed some scenes, I developed some characters, I (added) context of the story in Algeria. All these elements, political elements, were important to understand better what Camus wanted to do with his book.”

He knew he had to seduce Catherine Camus with his vision, and he was honest with her from the get-go.

“You need to contextualise the book to understand it better, especially for a young audience, because in France, there is a kind of silence about French-Algeria. It’s a story of colonialism. It was very difficult for many French, for many Algerians, and it’s something we don’t speak about, especially in French families.”

One of the things Ozon did was to give the unnamed Arab murder victim a name: Moussa. It’s also a hat-tip from Ozon to the 2013 book The Meursault Investigation by Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who wrote a novel from the perspective of the victim’s brother.

It was important to Ozon to recognise the humanity of the victim with a name, and it’s a decision that was validated when in Q&A screenings of the film in France, he was approached by members of the Algerian diaspora community who told him that small act helped them reconcile with Camus’s book.

Which is not to say that Camus’s intention was dehumanise the victim, but rather it was a political choice to highlight the second-class citizen status of L’etranger’s victim. At the time of publication, the context was ever-present for his readers, 80 years later in Ozon’s era, the colonialist legacy of French-Algeria is different.

Growing up, Ozon read Camus’s book in school as part of an assignment, and like many other students, that which was mandatory didn’t have the same appeal as something discovered for oneself.

“I didn’t really enjoy the book when I read it for the first time,” he recalled. “When I was young, I was into the books of Emily Bronte, Emil Zola or Victor Hugo, more romantic and adventure book.

“I didn’t really understand what Camus wanted to say when I was young, and it’s a very mysterious, powerful and secret book.

“That was one of the reasons of the adaptation. I wanted to try and understand this book because there’s a very easy first reading. It’s not difficult to follow the story. Everything is simple, but it’s very deep inside, and so I wanted to discover the mystery of Meursault.”

As a character, Meursault as a character is an enigma because he even though he’s telling you exactly how he feels, it’s something we can’t accept but what he feels is nothing – he tells his girlfriend Marie it matters not to him whether they marry or not.

It’s that disconnection from the world which dooms him because it’s not something we can reconcile.

“When you don’t act like how society wants you to act, you are condemned, and that’s why Meursault is so ambiguous, so mysterious and still so powerful for a young generation of people,” Ozon said.

“He’s someone who doesn’t lie. He’s close to his truth - ‘I have no emotion, I don’t cry, that’s my reality, that’s my truth’. If people admit that, it’s a problem for society. So, it speaks to the hypocrisy of society, and people who don’t play the game.”

Ozon said that there is a bit of Meursault in all of us, and that he has many times in his life felt just like Camus’s protagonist.

“Suddenly, you are not able to express what is inside, you are in a kind of distance, and maybe it’s a way to protect yourself.”

It was a challenge for lead actor Benjamin Voisin to plunge into the darkness of a character who doesn’t emote, and who has convinced himself of his separation from the world.

Ozon has previously worked with Voisin on another film, Summer of 85, and said the actor is the opposite of Meursault.

“He’s full of life, he’s full of seduction, he’s very warm, he’s an actor, actually, and it was quite difficult to ask an actor not to act, especially for Benjamin. It was very painful for him, but at the same time, he’s very good and powerful because inside, you can feel there is a depth, and many emotions and feelings.

“At the end of the shoot, Benjamin was totally depressed.”

If you’ve seen Voisin in the Apple TV French-language series Careme, you would see a version of the actor that is much closer to reality. In that series, he is exuberant and energetic, someone who never stops moving and feeling.

“Careme is more a documentary (about Voisin) than my film!” Ozon said. “That means he’s a great actor because he’s able to compose himself and be someone else. He has real charisma, and I needed an actor with real charisma and star quality because (Meursault) doesn’t express emotions. He has no dialogue.

“You have to feel he’s fascinating to follow him because if you don’t, you turn on him, and it’s boring.”

Now that he’s come out the other side mounting and releasing L’etranger, Ozon definitely has a much better understanding of a literary monument that previously eluded him. But what it really means to him changes every day.

“That’s why it’s a masterpiece. If I’m optimistic, I have a certain vision, if I’m pessimistic, I have a bad vision, but it’s always interesting to plunge into the world of Camus, and I really enjoyed trying to understand him.”

L’etranger (The Stranger) is in cinemas on April 16