France’s Ozon under the gun with big screen take on Camus classic

French director Francois Ozon has dared to do what so many other filmmakers have shied away from — adapting one of French literature’s most-read classics, Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”, for the big screen.

The “8 Women” director said this week he had rediscovered Camus’s 1942 novel after first reading it in school like so many other French teenagers — but not really understanding its deeper absurdist meaning.

“I was shocked reading it because the book was still so strong, so powerful, so mysterious and so I was excited,” Ozon told journalists at the Venice Film Festival where “The Stranger” premiered on Tuesday.

“It was a big challenge because when I decided to make it, so many French people told me, ‘It’s my favorite book, I’m curious to see what you will do’, so it was a big pressure.”

Ozon said it was crucial to bring a more contemporary view to the novel, which takes place in 1930s Algeria under French colonialism, where Meursault, the Algerian-born French protagonist, kills an Arab man, who is never named in the book.

It was “impossible” for the Arab victim to remain nameless, said Ozon, who gives him a name in the film while fleshing out the character of his sister, whose honour the murdered man tried to defend.

“It was important to give a name to this man who is dead because during the trial (of Mersault), we never speak about him,” he said.

He said that choice was “political, especially today where there is a real invisibility of the victims in Gaza, for example.”

The only other well-known film version of “L’Etranger”, whose stage adaptation is a fixture in French theatres, is a 1967 film by Italian maestro Luchino Visconti starring Marcello Mastroianni.

Ozon said he told Camus’s daughter Catherine that a too-faithful rendering of the book — as he believes Visconti did — would not work.

“I said to her, ‘We have to look at the story with the eyes of today.’ It’s impossible to follow the book like someone in 1942,” he told AFP.

– Colonial tensions –

Filmed in Morocco and starring Benjamin Voisin as the detached Meursault — who is sentenced to be beheaded for his crime — Ozon’s “The Stranger” is set under a blinding sun and shot in black and white.

“For me it was quite obvious to shoot in black and white, to show the sun… to have something very abstract, very pure and not to be disturbed by colours,” Ozon said.

The film begins with archival footage of Algiers — images of the wealthy white French elite in Algeria contrasted with those of Algerians — that hint at the tensions simmering just under the surface of colonial rule.

“I wanted to be realistic about the situation in Algeria. I wanted to show both communities. I wanted to show that these two communities live side by side,” he said.

The Hollywood Reporter said Camus’s classic “works splendidly on the page but does not necessarily translate well to the screen.”

Yet it said Ozon’s new adaptation “gets many, many things right”.

Variety called it “a superb portrait of disaffection”.

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