The Stranger – Radio 3 Drama | BBC Sounds

Ozon originally planned a portrait of a young, disillusioned man of today. Benjamin Voisin, whom Ozon had discovered for his film “Summer 85”, was already planned as the cast. When Ozon got stuck with this project, he was inspired by Camus’ novel, where he was particularly interested in looking at France’s colonial past in Algeria, not least in connection with his own family history, his grandfather living in Algeria.

Ozon began to research intensively, comb through archives, talk to contemporary witnesses and noticed that this part of French history was buried under a blanket of silence and that there are hardly any films about this time. In his adaptation he shifts the perspective, his film – unlike the book – does not begin with the death of Meursault‘s mother, but after his arrest in prison, as the only white man among all Arabs, with the famous sentence, “I killed an Arab”. He focuses on the racism of the French colonial power and corrects the novel: He gives the nameless victim a name on the tombstone and a sister who speaks for him.

Set in Algiers in 1938, the title character Meursault is an inconspicuous French office worker who observes his surroundings with detachment and reacts strangely indifferently to everything he sees, be it the death of his mother, the sleazy neighbor Raymond Sintés (Pierre Lottin) who beats his Arab girlfriend, another neighbor (Denis Lavant) who mistreats his dog, the offer to work in a Paris branch of his company, and also the expression of love from his beautiful girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder): When she asks “Would you marry me?”, he replies unmoved “If you want, I don’t care, it’s not important.” “You’re strange,” she states, “not like the others. You always say everything you think.”

This is exactly the central provocation that later becomes Meursault’s undoing. Basically no one here is interested in a dead Arab; Meursault is sentenced to death because he resolutely refuses to show remorse in court, in accordance with social conventions.

For the young actor Benjamin Voisin, this means that he is basically not allowed to act at all, which works much better than casting the very charismatic Marcello Mastroianni under the direction of Visconti.

In interviews, Voisin has stated that this role was his most physically demanding because it was a physical effort not to act, not to interpret, to be a spectator of his own life. In their direction and acting, Ozon and Voisin create a field of tension between external beauty and inner emptiness, which hits the core of the novel well.

Unlike Lucchino Visconti, Ozon did not shoot in color but in black and white. There are economic reasons for this, because the tight budget did not allow a reconstruction of Algeria in the 1930s. As in his film “Frantz” about the aftermath of the First World War, Ozon also uses black and white here like a kind of historical make-up, after all, the collective memory, the archive material from these times, is almost never in color.

In addition to the economic reasons, there are aesthetic reasons; Ozon consistently shot it as if it were a film made in the 1940s; he even used the historical logo of the French production company Gaumont. Cameraman Manuel Dacosse has created beautiful, exquisitely composed, but also very clear, pure images.

Razor-sharp light contrasts allow the textures of skin and hair, water drops and grains of sand on the surfaces to be sensually felt. At the same time, they create a distance that reflects Meursault’s attitude. With his new adaptation of the literary classic, Ozon achieves the balancing act between faithfulness to the work and new interpretation in a truly impressive way.