More than 80 years after it was published, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger remains one of the most widely read and fiercely contested French books in the world.
Until now, few attempts have been made to adapt the novel, published in English as The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive for its portrayal of France’s colonisation of Algeria.
The culture website Cult News wrote: “Adapting Albert Camus’ L’Étranger for the cinema is rather like climbing the Himalayas.”
The French director François Ozon has attempted to rise to the challenge with a black-and-white adaptation of the 1942 novel that has revived the polemic over what Camus said – or failed to say – about French Algeria, which ended in 1962 after a war of independence.
Ozon’s L’Étranger will be released (as The Stranger) in the UK next year and has received mixed reviews. The film is long, atmospheric and as 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 detachment after he kills “an Arab” on a beach sees him condemned to death by decapitation.
In 1967, the Italian director Luchino Visconti made the first film of the novel, starring Marcello Mastroianni, but it was viewed as a failure. Visconti had wanted Alain Delon in the role but was reportedly overruled by the film studio.
Nedjib Sidi Moussa, a political scientist, teacher and author of several books on Algeria, said the new film succeeded in conveying the absurdity of Camus’s first novel.
“Ozon was faithful to the text in that he accurately conveyed what L’Étranger is: a novel of the absurd. Meursault is not condemned to death for killing an Arab. Colonial justice would not condemn a European to death for killing an indigenous person.
“Meurseult is condemned for his indifference, for not crying at his mother’s death, because he has an extramarital relationship and is an atheist. All this clashes with the values of European colonial society and this is why he is condemned. L’Étranger isn’t an anti-colonialist manifesto, Camus is painting a picture of a society he knows well.”
Camus, who won the 1957 Nobel prize in literature, was born in French Algeria to pied noir parents – of French and European descent, born under French colonial rule. As a French citizen, even a poor one, he would have enjoyed rights not afforded to the country’s majority Arabs or Berbers.
Sidi Moussa said Ozon had made subtle references to the dehumanising side of colonial society, for colonised and coloniser.
“The film is daring and faithful to the book in that respect and with these little personal touches it reconstructs the story to speak to today’s audiences. It’s pretty well done from that point of view,” he said.
A review by the cinema programmer Jacques Déniel for Causeur magazine was less enthusiastic.
“Ozon’s adaptation fluctuates between a certain fidelity – Mersault’s indifference and lack of human compassion – and blatant betrayal owing to its lack of metaphysical ambition and its politically correct interpretation of the novel,” Déniel wrote.
“In Camus’s work, absurdity springs from the clash between man and the world. In Ozon’s work, it dissolves into a seamless mise-en-scène. François Ozon’s L’Étranger is a polished, thoughtful, masterful film, but one that lacks inspiration. The film-maker does not adapt Camus: he comments on him.”
Catherine Brun, a professor of literature at the Sorbonne, said L’Étranger continued to divide French society because the story was opaque.
“The novel remains an enigma on to which everyone can project their own interpretations. Much like Camus,” she said. “It is as much about what is not said; the silences in the book over the question of French colonialism over which there is no consensus.”
Brun added: “With L’Étranger, Camus can be seen as being on either side of the polemic. He mirrors the tensions and contradictions. Everyone finds something in it to back their argument or settle scores. Nobody can have the last word. As a subject it is inexhaustible.”
Camus died in a car crash in January 1960 aged 46. Catherine Camus, 80, his daughter and the custodian of his work, said she liked the film, though she also thought Ozon had fallen victim to political correctness in playing up the role of the murdered Arab’s sister, called Djemila. In the novel neither are named; in the film, the final shot is of her at her brother’s grave marked with his name in Arabic, Moussa Hamdani.
“I thought the film was very good but not the role he gave the sister at the end,” Camus said. “She is shown at her brother’s grave; this is not in the book and I felt it was a contradiction. I think François Ozon did it to satisfy wokeism.”
Ozon visited Catherine Camus’s home in the village of Lourmarin in Vaucluse, where the author had lived and worked, and told journalists he persuaded her to trust him with the adaptation. “I was very happy about that because I knew she had turned down other film-makers. I was aware of the responsibility that fell on me,” he said.
In a statement to the European Film Awards, Ozon said: “It was a huge challenge to adapt a masterpiece that everyone has read and every reader has already visualised and staged in their own mind.”
He said giving the Arab’s sister greater presence in the film felt like “pulling on a thread that Camus had woven without developing”.
“Djemila … has a conscience and a voice in the film. She is there to bear witness to the fact that, in this story and at the trial, her brother is never mentioned, even though he is the one who was murdered,” he said.
“It was important, through her character, to stage how the Arab is rendered invisible, to show that two worlds lived side by side without seeing each other. They did not mix on the streets or the beach. And they certainly did not have the same status. Camus was aware of this unease between the two communities.”
