Albert Camus always rejected the queer reading of his novel L’Étranger, but director François Ozon insists on it in his adaptation. One of the urtexts of existentialism known for its blank refusal of emotion, the book famously opens with its antihero coolly announcing the death of his mother. Ozon’s Meursault (no cosy first name), for his part, tells us similarly blankly that “I killed an Arab”, again shifting the story slightly. The dead man was a “stranger” – one translation of “L’étranger”. Another is “outsider”, and refers to Meursault himself, a white Frenchman in brown Algeria, a coloniser in someone else’s country.
Ozon gets all this done just like that and then proceeds to tell the story much as Camus told it. A strangely blank man with no real connection to anything around him deals with the death of his mother, has a relationship with a pretty young woman (Rebecca Marder) who masochistically wants to marry this man who won’t tell her he loves her, and winds up killing Moussa Hamdani (Abderrahmane Dehkani), an Arab trying to take revenge against one of Meursault’s neighbours, the pimp Sintès (Pierre Lottin), who has beaten Hamdani’s sister badly.
Meursault’s aloof disconnectedness works to his advantage most of the time – pretty Marie clearly sees Meursault as a challenge and the Arabs he comes into contact with seem to take it as part of his master-race entitlement. But once he gets into court on the murder charge, Meursault’s cold attitude to everyone and everything – his dead mother in particular – really start to count against him. If only Meursault would play the game and fake an emotion…
Making a film about an absence, a lack of something, is clearly a challenge. How do you get nothing on to the screen? Ozon clearly does not want the blank disconnectedness of his affectless central character to translate into audience ennui and so he goes in for a sensory assault, with stark, beautiful black and white images. He’s also amplified the homoerotic element, insisting this was in Camus’s novel all along by having the telltale passages read out in voiceover. The meeting between Meursault and Hamdani is all lingering looks, with the camera nuzzling Hamdani’s armpit hair as erotic glances are traded.
Even so, it’s a film that’s easier to appreciate than like. Benjamin Voisin is a fine and handsome Meursault and Rebecca Marder a sexy though bafflingly supine Marie. Pierre Lottin is a brilliantly swaggering Sintès, and there’s a blur-on by Denis Lavant as Meursault’s neighbour Salamano, whose brutal treatment of his dog is yet another instance of a relationship based on disdain or cruelty.
It’s only really in scenes towards the end, when Meursault is in prison awaiting his fate and a priest tries to unlock his psyche, that things start to crackle – “We’re all guilty and we’re all condemned” Meursault tells him. It’s meant to be devastating, the clincher, and to an extent it is. But there’s also a touch of the teenage flounce about this section – teenagers love the misunderstood loner aspect of Camus.
Ultimately, Meursault is a descendant of one of Kafka’s men blundering through life and getting it all wrong because they won’t play by others’ rules. Depending on your mood, the day of the week or the direction of the wind, this is either highly laudable or just plain stupid.
You might expect such a major cornerstone of world literature to have been filmed more often, but L’Étranger has only made it to the screen a handful of times. Emotionlessness in a book with an authorial voice as a sauce is one thing, but served up dry is another. Ozon goes out with The Cure’s Killing an Arab jangling away jauntily as the end credits rolls as if to suggest he’s squared the circle. Maybe he has.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
