Languor and the Mediterranean coast go together, it turns out, like François Ozon and Albert Camus. The prolific French filmmaker, who is giving the long-dead workhorse Rainer Werner Fassbinder a run for his money in terms of annual output, adapts Camus’ economical existential novel “L’Étranger” for a new film, told in black-and-white, by the same name.
Ozon’s “The Stranger” the first bona fide adaptation of Camus’ 1942 book — about a detached, even fatalistic French settler who kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers — since Luchino Visconti brought it to the screen in 1967, when the Italian filmmaker famously, according to some, miscast the role of Meursault with Italian matinee idol Marcello Mastroianni rather than the more icily beautiful and enigmatic Alain Delon.
Ozon seizes the opportunity to rectify that casting misstep by assigning the lithe, raffishly charismatic French actor Benjamin Voisin to the role of Meursault. The 29-year-old received a César nomination this year for “The Stranger,” and it’s his latest collaboration with Ozon after playing a punkish love object in “Summer of 85,” a French successor to “Call Me by Your Name.”
“It’s true that Marcello Mastroianni, who is a great actor, is totally miscast [in Visconti’s version],” Ozon told IndieWire via a translator. “Especially for us French because Marcello is so Italian, and Meursault is so French. In one interview, Visconti said his first choice was Alain Delon… he would have been a perfect Meursault. What I like with Delon and Benjamin Voisin is you’re not in identification with the character — more in a feeling of fascination. You observe them, you try to understand the character. You don’t empathize. You try to resolve the enigma of that character. It’s fascinating to have [an actor] who is so mysterious. “
As a newcomer in “Summer of 85,” Voisin embodied “a cocky denim vision with thick fingers, arrow-like cheekbones, and the bottomless jaw of a cartoon superhero,” as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote. Meursault is more like an unknowable alien in a foreign land, a figment, a projection of a man whose indifference to crimes he’s committed becomes his downfall. That meant a very different kind of performance from Voisin, whose character, after committing a murder, goes blank.
In real life, “he’s very charming, he’s very seductive, he’s an easy guy. He’s very sensual in life,” Ozon said. This film “was a big challenge for him because his way of being is really an actor. He’s always acting. He’s acting on the set but in life, too. So in the case of this film, I asked him not to act. So it was quite difficult for him to be inside and ask him to watch Robert Bresson, to be a kind of model. He doesn’t have a problem with the male gaze on him. He’s very gay-friendly, so he trusts me…. [but] he was quite depressed during the shooting. We were shooting in Morocco, with all the crew every night, we went to dinner, we had some parties. But he never came, and usually he’s the first one to come, to drink, to have fun. For this film, he stayed in his room watching flies on the ceiling. He was totally focused on the character, and it was not easy for the other actors.”
That included Rebecca Marder, who plays Meursault’s love interest Marie, from whom he’s just as detached as the Arab man he kills, or from the mother whose funeral he felt nothing at.
“Rebecca said to me every day, ‘He’s so impolite. He doesn’t say hello to me. He’s not nice.’ And actually,” that was perfect for the character of Meursault,” Ozon said. As for Voisin’s reputation and stature in France, the director added, “He’s not Timothée Chalamet yet, but he is loved, of course.”
Camus’ novel is not in the public domain, which meant that Ozon had to “seduce” the author’s surviving daughter, Catherine Camus, the keeper of the writer’s estate, with his vision for the adaptation.
“At first, she was a little anxious because I explained to her that I thought the role of women should be developed compared to the novel, and that colonization should be dealt with. She was worried the adaptation would go against her father’s novel, but I explained to her that, on the contrary, I thought it would enrich the novel. Since then, she’s been very happy with the film,” said Ozon, who expands on the Arab man’s inner life by including a coda with his wife visiting his grave.
“I also think that the Camus heirs were a little frightened by U.S. critics who have attacked Camus and ‘The Stranger’ as a colonialist novel. I think that Catherine Camus was a little worried about this, and I told her that I don’t consider it a colonialist work at all. On the contrary, contextualizing it would better explain that aspect of things,” Ozon added. “I know that many people would feel like they had been left behind or abandoned by my adaptation. It’s a good thing the book will soon be in the public domain because then everyone will be able to make their own version.”
The scene in which Meursault shoots the unnamed Arab man dead on the shimmering coastline, against weathered chunks of rocks, has an I daresay homoerotic fizzle to it; “The Stranger” would not be an Ozon film without some kind of queer frisson, but he thinks that might be a misunderstanding.
“A typically North American question!,” he laughed. “All American journalists ask me about my queer gaze on this book, and for me, what was important was the sensuality, that there be sensuality everywhere. Of Marie’s body when she’s swimming with him. That nature be extremely sensual, that we feel the beauty of Algeria in those years and also in the murder. In the book, the murder scene is written in an erotic manner but not a homosexual way, but rather, in the strangeness of the difference between these two men, these two bodies, and that’s something that is in my mise-en-scene of the murder scene because I chose to expand time in that moment. We really feel these two bodies: Meursault’s body standing, the Arab man’s body passive, and so of course our gaze projects things on top of that.”
Ozon said that, in fact, his inspiration was the duels in Sergio Leone movies, “where we have two men facing each other, their hands on their weapons, a close-up on their eyes. If you think Sergio Leone’s westerns have a queer element, then I’m happy to accept that the murder scene is queer.”
Maybe not, but then again, Sergio Leone didn’t kick off one of said duels with a close-up on a man’s hairy armpit.
“Sergio Leone doesn’t do that. He should have!” Ozon laughed.
“The Stranger” opens from Music Box Films on Friday, April 4.
