New film adaptation of Camus’s novel The Stranger opens old colonial wounds | François Ozon

More than 80 years after its publication, Albert Camus’s The Stranger remains one of the most widely read and hotly contested French books in the world.

To date, there have been few attempts to adapt the novel, which was published in English under the title The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive because of its depiction of the French colonization of Algeria.

“Adapting Albert Camus’s L’Étranger for cinema is a bit like climbing the Himalayas,” wrote the cultural website Cult News.

French director François Ozon attempted to rise to the challenge with his black-and-white adaptation of the 1942 novel, reviving debate over what Camus said – or failed to say – about French Algeria, which ended in 1962 after the War of Independence.

Ozon’s L’Étranger (as The Stranger) will be released in the UK next year and has received mixed reviews. The film is long, atmospheric and ponderous as the taciturn antihero Meursault, played by Benjamin Voisin, a French settler in Algiers.

His failure to show emotion after his mother’s death and cold breakup after he kills an “Arab” on the beach land him sentenced to death by beheading.

In 1967, Italian director Luchino Visconti directed the first film based on the novel, starring Marcello Mastroianni, but it was considered a failure. Visconti wanted Alain Delon to play the role, but the film studio reportedly refused.

Naguib Sidi Moussa, professor of political science and author of several books on Algeria, said that the new film succeeded in conveying the absurdity of Camus’s first novel.

“Ozon was faithful to the text because he accurately conveyed what the novel ‘The Stranger’ was: a novel of the absurd. Meursault was not sentenced to death for killing an Arab. Colonial justice would not sentence a European to death for killing an indigenous person.”

“Meursault is condemned for his indifference, for not crying over his mother’s death, for having an extramarital affair and for being an atheist. All of this goes against the values ​​of European colonial society and that is why he is condemned. The Stranger is not an anti-colonial statement, Camus paints a picture of a society he knows well.”

Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, was born in French Algeria to a father Pied Noir Fathers – Of French and European descent, he was born under French colonial rule. As a French citizen, even if he was poor, he would have enjoyed rights that the majority of Arabs or Berbers in the country did not enjoy.

Sidi Moussa said that Ozon subtly pointed out the inhuman side of colonial society, for the colonizer and the colonized.

“The film is bold and faithful to the book in that regard, and with these little personal touches it rebuilds the story to speak to today’s audiences. It’s well done from that point of view,” he said.

The review by cinema programmer Jacques Dennel for Causeor magazine was less enthusiastic.

“Ozon’s adaptation oscillates between a certain sincerity—Meursault’s indifference and lack of human compassion—and blatant betrayal by his lack of metaphysical ambition and his politically correct interpretation of the novel,” Dennel wrote.

“In Camus’s work, absurdity arises from the clash between man and the world. In Ozon’s work, it dissolves into seamless spectacle. François Ozon’s ‘The Stranger’ is a polished, thoughtful and ingenious film, but it lacks inspiration. The director does not adapt Camus: he comments on it.”

L’Étranger continued to divide French society because the story was ambiguous, said Catherine Brun, a literature professor at the Sorbonne.

“The novel remains a puzzle to which everyone can offer their own interpretations,” she said. “Much like Camus.” “It is about what is not said; the silence in the book on the question of French colonialism on which there is no consensus.”

Brun added: “In ‘The Stranger’, Camus can be seen as standing on both sides of the debate. He reflects tensions and contradictions. Everyone finds something in him to support their argument or settle scores. No one can have the last word. As a subject, it is inexhaustible.”

Camus died in a car accident in January 1960 at the age of 46. Catherine Camus, 80, his daughter and custodian of his works, said she loved the film, although she also thought Ozon fell victim to political correctness in playing the murdered Arab’s sister, called Jamila. Neither of them is mentioned in the novel. The last shot of her in the film is at her brother’s grave with his name written in Arabic, Musa Hamdani.

“I thought the movie was very good, but not the role he gave the sister at the end,” Camus said. “She showed up at her brother’s grave; that’s not in the book and I felt it was a contradiction. I think François Ozon did that to satisfy vigilantism.”

Ozon visited Catherine Camus’s home in the Vaucluse village of Lourmarin, where the author lived and worked, and told journalists that he had convinced her to trust him with the adaptation. He said: “I was very happy about that because I knew that she had rejected other directors. I was aware of the responsibility placed on me.”

In a statement to the European Film Awards, Ozon said: “It was a huge challenge to adapt a masterpiece that everyone has read and that every reader has already conceived and present it in their mind.”

He said that giving the Arab sister a greater presence in the film seemed like “pulling a thread that Camus wove without developing it.”

“Jamila… has a conscience and a voice in the film,” he said. “She is there to bear witness to the fact that in this story and in the trial, her brother was never mentioned, even though he was the one who was killed.”

“It was important, through her character, to depict how the Arab becomes invisible, to show that two worlds live side by side without seeing each other. They did not mix in the streets or the beach. They certainly did not have the same status. Camus was aware of this anxiety between the two communities.”