Why Francois Ozon’s The Stranger threatens to reopen old wounds inflicted by Albert Camus

The nihilistic murder of an unnamed Arab man that forms the heart of the original novella was a violently divisive literary act. Will the cinema screen offer a different perspective?

Benjamin Voisin stars as Meursault in The Stranger. Photo: Venice International Film Festival

Now 83 years old, Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger remains as influential and resonant as ever. At the Venice Film Festival this week, an exquisite adaptation by French filmmaker Francois Ozon was unveiled, 58 years after the last major cinematic version, by Luchino Visconti, was also launched on the Lido.

It is not the only work playing at this year’s festival to lean on Camus. A Prophet, the television series that reinterprets the 2009 award-winning prison drama by Jacques Audiard, also makes reference to The Stranger.

Over the years, Camus’ story of a withdrawn French-Algerian man who murders a young Arab in cold blood has inspired literature, music, comics and even video games. Case in point: the very end of Ozon’s film, as the credits roll, features The Cure’s debut single Killing an Arab, which lead singer Robert Smith has said was written in reaction to reading Camus’ text. Selecting the provocatively titled song is arguably a risky artistic choice by Ozon, who may face difficulties getting the film distributed in the Mena region due to the way Camus coldly presented the victim.

Director Francois Ozon at the screening of The Stranger at the 82nd Venice Film Festival. Reuters

In the story, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, in Ozon’s film) is arrested and put on trial for murder after shooting the Arab man five times when they meet on a beach. Why? It’s nigh-on impossible to discern as the aloof Meursault says almost nothing at his trial, showing no signs of remorse. The book caused considerable controversy, especially in Arabic-speaking countries, because the Arab character was not given a name.

“You have to put it in context,” Ozon recently told Variety. “I believe that not naming him wasn’t about racism or a desire to make him invisible, it was just a way of characterising a character. It was a literary technique used at the time, nothing more.”

That may be true, but Camus’ work spawned a counter-offensive by author Kamel Daoud. His 2013 debut novel The Meursault Investigation imagined Haroun, a brother of the murdered Arab, who recounts the grief he and his mother felt after this death.

As The New Yorker put it at the time: “Daoud has said that his novel is an homage … but it reads more like a rebuke.” Daoud gave the victim a name, Musa. And yet it was never going to have the same impact as The Stranger, one of the three most-read books in France, with nearly 10 million copies sold in that country alone.

Benjamin Voisin stars alongside Rebecca Marder in The Stranger. Photo: Venice International Film Festival

Certainly, Camus’ influence in popular culture remains undimmed (punk band The Ramones, TV shows Lost and Breaking Bad and Haruki Murakami, in his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, have all nodded to the author).

So it is no real surprise that the novella turns up in A Prophet. The show reimagines the story of the original film’s character Malik, played here by Mamadou Sidibe, a young African immigrant drug mule who rises through the prison system. At one point, he spies a copy of The Stranger, owned by another prisoner. When that inmate meets a grisly fate, he takes the book and reads it.

Examining the notion of foreignness and the other, just like The Stranger before it, the Marseille-set show paints a world where French and Arab people coexist in an incendiary melting pot.

“I guess it's a difficult topic that evolved over the decades but stayed difficult,” A Prophet’s Italian director Enrico Maria Artale tells The National. He understands how Camus’ work caused so much reaction, he adds, given the anti-Arab violence in The Stranger. “I’m not surprised that this book is still provoking so many reflections.”

From left, Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera, actress Rebecca Marder, director Francois Ozon and actor Benjamin Voisin. EPA

Praised in early reviews (“confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling”, remarked Variety), Ozon’s film remains in the running for Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. If nothing else, the lush black-and-white cinematography from Manuel Dacosse surely merits a prize for technical achievement.

And yet, while The Stranger remains a fascinating study of postcolonial tensions between France and Algeria, there is something triggering about Ozon filming this now. Should it even have been made? Is it likely to further stoke tensions between the French and those in Arab countries? Only time will tell.

Intriguingly, Ozon felt the project was a way of reconnecting with his own personal history. His maternal grandfather, an examining magistrate in Bone (now Annaba) in Algeria, survived an assassination attempt there.

And no doubt he will point to the sensitivity of his approach. The victim’s sister, for example, who was unnamed in the novella, is called Djemila and given more of a voice than she had in the book. Ozon also approached Fatima Al Qadiri, a Senegalese-born Kuwaiti musician, to produce the score.

Although earnest in his intentions to examine the raw pain that remains between France and Algeria, it remains to be seen whether audiences will understand Ozon's perspective or see it as further provocation.