The recently concluded 39th annual AFI Film Festival screened 160-plus features and documentaries. One of the best was François Ozon’s screen adaptation of Albert Camus’ classic 1942 novel The Stranger (L’étranger).
It’s strange how words and their meanings change over time. Nowadays, “existential” refers to something or someone whose very existence is at stake, and it is often invoked in relation to the climate crisis or nuclear war, as well as in regard to matters of lesser importance. But there was a time when “existential” was derived from existentialism, a worldview that was debated and argued over by beret-wearing, Gauloises-smoking, absinthe-swigging, baguette-chomping philosophers at Parisian cafes and elsewhere. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, Albert Camus was one of the most prominent proponents of existentialist philosophy.
Existentialism is hard for me to define, but it has a lot to do with alienation. Another word for this psychological sense of distance and disconnection is “estrangement,” and if you want to understand existentialism, Camus exquisitely expresses and dramatizes this concept in The Stranger. And French director/screenwriter François Ozon (2003’s The Swimming Pool, co-starring Charlotte Rampling) has done a sterling job, adapting Camus’ novel for the silver screen in glorious black and white, with cinematography by Manu Dacosse.
Following the old-time Gaumont logo, the movie opens with a kitschy montage of Algiers stressing the North African locale’s exoticism, which seems as if it is lifted from a travelogue. It sets the stage, and is one of the film’s few passages that are not in the novel per se. The film takes place approximately 30 years before Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 revolutionary masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, ends, with the Arab nation winning its independence from France. However, Ozon’s montage cleverly concludes with graffiti on a wall about the National Liberation Front (which went on to lead Algeria’s bloody liberation struggle).
Meursault (portrayed by the handsome 28-year-old Paris-born Benjamin Voisin) is the eponymous character of The Stranger. Like Camus, he lives in Algeria, but is of French ancestry, and is therefore one of the colonizers known as “pied-noir” (which can literally be translated as “dark foot”). Unlike Camus, who joined Communist organizations, The Stranger’s protagonist is apolitical. A clerk at a shipping firm in Algiers, Meursault seems detached from most people and is unlikely to join any group or take a stand on any issues of the day.
A rare exception to his not-so-benign indifference is Marie (Rebecca Marder), an attractive former secretary at his office, who spots him at a beach club in Algiers, and they become lovers. Just about the only time Meursault comes alive and seems really connected to anyone else is when he makes love to Marie in passionately shot sex scenes. Otherwise, his detachment and psychological isolation are the menu of the day for his emotions (or lack of), and it’s really hard to see why Marie pursues such an aloof individual.
I don’t want to disclose plot spoilers and ruin any surprises for moviegoers unfamiliar with Camus’ novel. Suffice it to say that Meursault is put on trial for murdering an Algerian. When an uninvited priest (Swann Arlaud) makes an unannounced visit to minister to Meursault in his prison cell, for the first time (aside from making love with Marie), he shows emotion. A highlight of the story is the philosophical argument between the inmate and the clergyman, which, of course, is a literary and here cinematically rendered discourse of existentialism versus religion. To tell you the truth, it was electrifying to see someone standing up to and fighting with a man of the cloth, as he tries to spout his trite piety, and this may be the best scene in The Stranger, as Meursault holds forth against what Marx denounced as “the opiate of the people.”
I believe that The Stranger has generally been interpreted by Westerners as a dramatization of existentialist philosophy, which it is, to a great extent. But in light of the contemporary plight of Palestinians, there’s another prism through which The Stranger can be viewed and understood. Camus himself may have been a “stranger” because he was a settler-colonizer in Algeria, and this may account for a sensibility of rootlessness, not belonging, being estranged. Given the ongoing West Bank and Gaza conflict, the shooting of an Arab by a settler takes on a whole new dimension as to what The Stranger is about.
The story also has an important subplot, wherein Meursault helps his dubious neighbor, a fellow pied-noir named Raymond Sintes (note that SIN is the prefix for his last name), played by Pierre Lottin, who has an Algerian mistress he abuses. Notably, it is the brother of Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit, reportedly a Berber born in Rabat, Morocco) who is shot and killed.
So, in addition to existentialism, The Stranger also has much to say about not only the condition of humanity at large, but also as a literary/movie meditation on the nature of the relations between Indigenous people and settler-colonialism. And that great existential question for smokers and non-smokers alike still remains to be answered: Would you walk a mile for a Camus? For this critic, Ozon’s film is well worth the trek, and I look forward to seeing it again.
The Stranger is two hours long and in French and Arabic with English subtitles. It will reportedly be released in America by Music Box Films in 2026.
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