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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NEW FILM ADAPTATION OF CAMUS’S L’ÉTRANGER OPENS OLD COLONIAL
WOUNDS  
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Kim Willsher
November 28, 2025
The Guardian
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_ François Ozon’s handling of classic novel draws both praise and
criticism, including from the author’s daughter _

Benjamin Voisin plays Meursault in François Ozon’s adaptation of
Albert Camus’ 1942 novel. , Photograph: Ent-movie/Alamy

 

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
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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 [[link removed]].

The culture website Cult News wrote [[link removed]]:
“Adapting Albert Camus’ L’Étranger for the cinema is rather
like climbing the Himalayas.”

[L’Étranger, 2025 poster]
Ozon’s L’Étranger will be released in the UK next year.
Photograph: FOZ - Gaumont/Prod.DB/Alamy

The French director François Ozon
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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
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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.

Ozon’s L’Étranger stars Rebecca Marder and Benjamin Voisin.
Photograph: BFA/Gaumont/Alamy

“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 is 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.

François Ozon, Rebecca Marder and Benjamin Voisin attend the film’s
premiere at the Venice film festival in September. Photograph: Abaca
Press/Alamy

In a statement to the European Film Awards
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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.”

* Albert Camus
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* the stranger
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* François Ozon
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* colonialism
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* Algeria
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* France
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