The Stranger Francois Ozon (Fr; 2025) Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder
viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 April 2026; ticket £13.25
Pardonnez-moi!
There is one scene towards the end of Francois Ozon’s adaptation of Camus’ ‘L’ Étranger’ (The Stranger) that defines the formulaic mediocre nature of his film. Mersault’s trial on charge of murder is over. He’s been found guilty and sentenced to death. The courtroom empties but two people stay put in their seats: Marie, Mersault’s girlfriend and Djemila the sister of the murdered Arab. Marie rises and walks across to Djemila. Marie looks at her and apologies for the death of her brother. Apology made Marie departs.
This above courtroom scene encapsulates the dishonesty at the core of Ozon’s movie. The scene is a second rate lazy borrowing from the sort of formula typically employed by Hollywood writers to script in artificial encounters that are thought necessary to the establishment of the status of a story. Ozon’s characters, in the opposite of a ‘meet cute’ situation, are manipulated into space where they can be alone, so that a moral purpose can be expressed. Ozon obviously feels that in today’s climate his target audience might feel uncomfortable viewing ‘The Stranger’ without some level of gestural recognition of the iniquitous nature of the French colonisation being given head room. Some one has to say: “Sorry!” As it makes no psycho-philosophical sense for Mersault apologise, Ozon lays on this specially manipulated scene for the girlfriend to do the honours. “Sorry!”. It’s like when the IDF bomb a school killing tens of Palestinian or Lebanese children, realising the wrong target has been hit they say: ‘Sorry!’ It makes everything OK. The ‘sorry scene’ comes across as a sort of insurance policy to deflect criticism, and a hypocritical device to appease the imagined sensitivities of his audiences. A filmmaker of integrity would have remained true to the ethos and prejudices of Camus’ times. Namely that Arabs were low order beings of no consequence to French or Europeans, lucky to be colonised and above all expendable. This is what a film maker committed to truth would show, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions about the nature of the attitudes characterising ‘Algerie Francais’.
Ozon’s final betrayal of Camus comes in the last shot where we see the grave of the Arab whom Mersault has murdered. Whereas through out his novella Camus remains true to the piednoir ethos of belittling Arabs by not giving the murdered Arab a name, Ozon panders to the neo-colonialist sensitivities of French commercial cinema by having his name chiselled into the grave’s headstone. We see that he was: Moussa Hamdani. The one with no name is named: a lubricious sleight of hand to ease the film’s path through Cannes critical reception and into distribution. A cheap gesture.
Interestingly an Algerian author Karnel Daoud in 2015 wrote a book called the ‘Mersault Investigaton’ which took as its theme Camus’ murdered Arab being given: No Name. Daoud’s book is a reclaiming of the dead man as a man with a name a family a life. It’s a sharply written sardonic critique of the French occupation with a sideways look at the increasingly repressive Islamic governance of Algeria. Daoud calls Mersault’s victim: Musa. For some reason Ozon has given the victim’s name as Moussa, a variation of Daoud’s. Other than this oblique sort of reference Ozon has chosen to ignore the spirit of Daoud’s book and made a film that is underscored by a feeble pretense at an apologia for the crimes of colonialism. “Sorry!”
Even on its own terms both in its structure and choice of shots ‘The Stranger’ looks like a movie of a book with which the Director has never come to terms. As he filmed his scenario he had less and less idea of what he was doing other than shooting in black and white (always a hit with the reviewers). ‘The Stranger’ has been shot and edited the more to distract the audience from the fact that Ozone has nothing to say about Camus’ work because he doesn’t actually relate to it, perhaps he doesn’t even understand it. It’s a property that conveniently has just come out of copyright, that now one way or anther can be realised, packaged and sold, without paying the author a sou.
After the titles, we are given the longeur of Meursault’s day and his journey to his mother’s funeral. This everyday business is intercut with flash forward shots to his prison cell, bugs etc evidencing that Ozon in his edit had no real conviction in this long dull long opening section of the film. It’s characterised by maxing out on M’s life in detail: he gets up dresses makes coffee shaves sits down stands up sits down gets on the bus looks out the window. It’s not interesting and fails to catch absurdist ennui riven nature of Camus’ prose; multiple invariant shots of M looking out blankly towards the camera just don’t cut into the existential dilemma of ‘the absurd’. Only access to state of mind might say this and Ozon has ditched voice over and opted for a collection of dull lifeless shots that say nothing. Likewise the fantasy sequence bolted onto the film, featuring Mersault meeting his dead mother at the sea side with a guillotine positioned high up on the top of a sand dune. This looks like another act of desperation trying to inject meaning into a film that struggles in this respect.
Whilst checking for details of the players I went to Wikipedia and Internet Movie Data Base. Looking at the cast details it was interesting to note that all the French actors were itemised with accompanying photos and links to their biographical details. None of the Arab actors had either their pictures or links to any biography. Sorry! ‘Plus ca change…..’ as they say.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
