François Ozon has typically filtered version of Albert Camus's existential novella The Stranger through his cool, ironic sensibility, the film's fluidity recalling at times the raw poetry of Fellini's and Pasolini's early work.
Set in the French Algeria of the 1930s, it follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) as he visits his mother’s funeral, meets his old lover Marie (Rebecca Marder) on a beach, and gets drawn into the domestic melodrama of his violent neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault's sudden ruthless murder of an Arab turns the stark drama into an absurd judicial farce.
Meursault is punished not for the crime but for his lack of hypocritical remorse during the trial. Ozon augments the unease generated by Meursault’s detachment with razor-sharp black and white mages, juxtaposing light with shadow, bare skin with steel bars.
Interviewed on a recent Zoom call, Ozon looked back at his first reading of the novella and the influence on him of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films.
PAMELA JAHN: How did your adaptation of The Stranger emerge from the project you'd been working on before?
FRANÇOIS OZON: Originally I had a completely different film in mind, about a young man who can't cope with the absurdity of today’s world and subsequently wants to commit suicide, but no one wanted to finance the story. So I gave up on the idea and, by chance, picked up Camus’s novella again – a book I hadn’t read since my school days. And I felt that this time around, the book spoke to me in a completely different way. I was discovering something universal about the human condition that had previously eluded me.
Even before Luchino Visconti’s disastrous 1967 version starring Marcello Mastroianni, the novella had been considered unfilmable. Did you have any trepidations about adapting it?
I did have some reservations. At the same time, I was explicitly concerned with telling the story from my contemporary perspective and not from the viewpoint of 1942. I wanted to review the context of colonialism of the time, further develop some of the book’s characters, and modernize the plot, because it is always important to me to connect my films to the world we are currently living in, even when dealing with historical material.
Does the existentialism embedded in the text still resonate with you?
Honestly, as a teenager I didn’t understand Camus. When you’re young, you’re searching for your place in the world; you ask questions about the meaning of life, death, love, everything. And all of that can, of course, be found in the novella, but at that age you don’t want to be lectured to – especially not by a school assignment. When I reread the book again I barely remembered the plot. Sure, there was the famous opening, the first few sentences everyone knows. But as I skimmed past that paragraph, I realised how relevant many of Camus’s ideas still are today. You just have to look around in everyday life or on television. Everything is absurd.
Would you describe yourself as an existentialist of sorts?
I’m no philosopher, no great thinker, and many of the things Camus’s protagonist Meursault says when he reflects on life still unsettle me. Like at the end, when he talks about how, on the day of his execution, a large crowd would greet him with shouts of hatred. I'm still not exactly sure what he really means by that. But that’s the point: I prefer it when certain things don't get explained. The Stranger is a book full of questions, and in the film I share my doubts and uncertainty with the audience.
You deliberately chose not to start with Camus's iconic first words about the death of his mother: "Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."
It was a straightforward decision. The beginning just didn’t seem as modern to me as it did back when the book was first published. In 1942, Camus’s [detached] tone may have been revolutionary. But the line that shocked me much more was Meursault’s statement that he had killed an Arab.
And you made that your first line. Can you explain what it means to you?
It implies that it was a racially motivated murder, even though that isn’t true. Camus leads the reader down the wrong path. For that reason alone, I found it compelling to begin the story the way that I do, because it forces the viewer to closely observe the events to look for signs of discrimination and xenophobia. But Meursault’s indifference toward everyone around him, especially the Arabs, is intended to be more than just a scathing critique of the French attitude toward people of a different skin colour. There are both colonialist and existentialist motives behind it. Meursault kills because he wants to destroy the harmony of the day, but he shoots an Arab, not a Frenchman – that's the essential difference.
Did you initially have reservations about opening your film with this line?
Yes. When I sent the script to Camus’s daughter Catherine, who strictly manages her father’s legacy and tries to preserve his work, Meursault says: "I killed a man." She then corrected the version, noting that her father had explicitly used the word "Arab". When I discovered her comment, I thought: OK, I can get away with that.
In Camus’s story, Meursault’s victim remains a vague figure. You give him a name, a family, his own identity.
That’s where the shift in perspective lies for me. In 1942, the political situation was completely different; Algeria was governed as a colony from 1830 to 1848 and followed the French Constitution as a federation of several departments until the country achieved independence in 1962. We must not forget this, because when Camus wrote the book, he was heavily influenced by American crime novels. For him, the Arab was almost like an archetype. But for us, of course, the term is provocative because we live in a different time, when there is also this issue with the invisibility of Arabs, for example in connection with the recent events in Gaza.
How would you describe Meursault from a contemporary perspective?
To me, this young man is like a blank slate onto which one can project whatever one wants. In film editing, there is this technique called the Kuleshov effect, in which the perception of an actor is altered by the images that follow his neutral facial expression. In other words: he himself uses neither facial expressions nor gestures. The emotion is conveyed through the editing. It’s the same with Meursault.
What did you discuss with Benjamin Voisin about how he should approach playing Meursault?
He had to find Meursault for himself, which was a real challenge for him, because off camera, he’s a completely different person. You can see it in my previous film Summer of 1985, where he gave me all his youthful energy and charm. Meursault, on the other hand, lives in a state of limbo, in an inner, self-contained world. I wanted to preserve that mystery surrounding him. It’s a terrible trend in today’s cinema to overanalyse every character. I wanted to avoid that, except for in the scene toward the end where Meursault attacks the priest – that’s the moment of his rebellion against the incongruity of the world.
Meursault is convicted not because he is a murderer, but because he did not cry at his mother’s funeral. How relevant do you feel this kind of morality is today?
He is executed because he does not adhere to society’s rules. That makes him a classic outsider. The trial is completely bizarre. It is not about the victim or any question of guilt. His offence is his apathy and the fact that he always remains true to himself. Everyone can draw their own moral from that.
You work incredibly fast. How do you manage to shoot a film as complex and artistically ambitious as The Stranger in such a short time?
I don’t spend two years on a screenplay. I’m not a director who needs to know exactly what a film will look like in the end. I draw my strength and energy from the creative process itself, without over-contextualising everything. For me, filmmaking is an endless adventure. I want to create something. I’m not a control freak like [Stanley] Kubrick, who didn’t work for years between projects. That would be far too boring for me.
Is that also why you feel such a strong connection to the cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was also prolific?
Discovering Fassbinder’s films was essential for me in every way, because after graduating I felt a bit lost. I didn’t know which direction to take, what my mission was, or exactly what kind of films I wanted to make. Closely looking at Fassbinder's body of work, I felt a deep connection that gave me stability and the courage to find my own path.
Were you not afraid that art might break you in the same way it destroyed Fassbinder?
For me, it was always important not to compromise, but to protect myself from certain dangers of creative work. Sometimes it can be dangerous to mix real life and art. I believe that for Fassbinder the two aspects became one. That’s how he created great cinema, but at the same time, he paid the price. When I was shooting my film Peter von Kant with Hanna Schygulla, I asked her if Fassbinder had died because he worked too much. She said, "No, that’s how he managed to survive. What killed him was the lack of love he experienced." That won't happen to me – at least, I hope not.
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