L’Étranger

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 … Read more