‘The Stranger’ queers an existentialist classic

When Albert Camus published L’Etranger (The Stranger) in 1942, he was living in Nazi-occupied France. No wonder, then, that this novel became one of the most famous “existential” novels of all time. Fascist regimes are perfect for stimulating ideas about an indifferent and meaningless world.

This was not the first time he faced authoritarianism. Born into a working-class white European family in what was then French Algeria, he grew up witnessing the harsh treatment of indigenous North Africans by the colonizers who ruled them. It is this personal history, amplified by the spread of European fascism, that finds its voice in The Stranger. Short, concise, and wrapped in the cloak of ennui, it was his first novel, a true novella, and its impact was devastating.

Unsurprisingly, its influence spread throughout the film world, and it has been translated to the screen three times so far. The film was recently directed by French filmmaker François Ozon, whose screen version won acclaim at last year’s Venice Film Festival and is now available for on-demand streaming in the United States.

Ozon’s vision is captured in sparkling black and white, fusing the sheen of modern faux-vintage fashion photography with the nostalgic flavor of classic-era “art house” and European cinema, and maintains a mostly faithful connection to Camus’ novel, at least in terms of plot. This is the story of Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French settler living in the capital of Algiers, who receives news that his mother has died. He took time off from work to attend her funeral and headed to the nursing home where he had sent her three years earlier, but remained emotionless throughout, with staff and other residents noting his apparent lack of habitual sadness.

When he returns to Algiers, he meets his former colleague Marie (Rebecca Marder), and after spending a day together, the two become romantically involved. Their relationship lasts for several weeks, and at the same time, she also begins dating Meursault’s neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lotin). Raymond (Pierre Lotin) is a suspected pimp who, after beating his Arab mistress, is followed and harassed by her brother (Abderrahmane Decani) and his friends. After a skirmish with the Arabs, Meursault encounters his brother alone while walking on the beach and shoots the young man dead with a pistol given to him by Raymond for protection. During his trial for murder, he offered no defense or expressed any remorse. Although he was found guilty and sentenced to death, he faced everything with emotional detachment, seemingly freed from the realization that none of it mattered anyway.

Despite being a story involving romance, murder, and courtroom drama, it feels like a story in which nothing actually happens. This is, of course, the perfect effect to emphasize Camus’ philosophical perspective. But while it may satisfy the type of audience that is attracted to film adaptations of Camus’ novels, Ozon’s film probably won’t appeal to audiences looking for action, suspense, feel-good emotions, and easy answers to the moral dilemmas of being alive. Camus was interested in the opposite effect, a confrontation with a presence that leaves no room for comfortable denial, but Ozon did not try to tone down the original theme to soften its impact.

But it is without adjusting the narrative provided by Camus that it introduces an element of queerness that gives the whole story a new layer of subtext through what can only be described as a “gay male gaze” that anchors the film’s visual aesthetic.

It’s the way Ozon and cinematographer Manu Dacosse’s cameras fixate on their star, the exquisitely beautiful Voisin, lingering on his face, bones, and body in swimming trunks. There is a sensuality in the female beauty that the director shows us, but it is never framed as an “object” of desire. And in the story’s key scene, the murder on the beach, there is an inescapable element of repressed homosexuality, perhaps born of its association with the mid-20th century queer aesthetics of writers like Jean Genet and artists like George Quintens, or from strutting arty commercials for high-end men’s cologne, or simply from real-life memories of cruising on the beach. On the surface, there is no sign of strangeness in Meursault. But the emphasis that Ozon brings to the story, almost purely by visual suggestion, gives this character, who is an outsider to the world of “normal” human experience to begin with, an even deeper sense of “otherness.”

In that regard, Voisin’s performance is effective for reasons beyond her physical perfection as a model. There’s a vast inner life going on beneath that pretty face, and the actor conveys it with a “less is more” approach that perfectly matches the character’s dissociation from conventional humanity. He is persuasive enough to draw us in, and in expressing Camus’s ideas, he is intelligent enough to help us understand them while making us feel them. And frankly, that’s saying a lot.

The rest of the cast is equally effective, though most of them serve primarily as foils that reflect Voisin and his characters. Marder brings a relatively intelligent yet romantic presence as Marie, and Lottin gives Raymond a kind of snarky charisma that evokes a kind of charming but toxic masculinity. Swann Arlot also stands out as the prison priest who tries to convert Meursault on the eve of his execution, and bears the brunt of Camus’s existential arguments in a scene where the characters discuss their impending death but somehow slip into transgressive homosexual fantasies.

Camus did not consider himself an existentialist. Instead, he accepted and promoted the perspective that human life is defined by what he called “absurdity” – the gap between reality and the expectations assumed about it – the apparent absurdity of our situations and actions, and believed that in a meaningless universe we are free to find our own meaning. An essay he published around the same time (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) argued that finding happiness in struggle is perhaps the most logical response to facing an unemotional world, and the absurdist movement he helped define used humor, albeit often of a darkly ironic kind, as a means of exposing the madness of trying to impose meaning on an irrational world. After all, his writings reveal him to be a deeply humanistic thinker, and his acceptance of objective reality only served to deepen his dedication to the ideal of a better humanity.

Whether such an emphasis on the immediacy of experience – the beach, the sea, the sun, the visceral reactions we get from sex and violence – comes across in Ozon’s artistic films, rather than the intellectual arguments that Camus would unravel throughout his life, probably depends on one’s own grasp of existentialist thinking and its ramifications. In any case, Ozon’s The Stranger may not rise to the challenge of making its philosophical point across, but it more than succeeds as a stylish piece of international art cinema, and may inspire audiences to delve deeper into the mind of Albert Camus.

Even if it doesn’t, it still looks beautiful.