Published in 1942, Albert Camus’s The Stranger is a staple of francophone literature, with French newspaper Le Monde ranking it number one in a list of the top books of the 20th century. The book thrust Camus into superstardom and began a fabled literary run that culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. A slice-of-life novella turned courtroom drama, The Stranger opens with the death of protagonist Meursault’s mother, which appears to have no tangible emotional effects on him. Several weeks later, he kills an unarmed Algerian man, and his indifference to his crime results in a death sentence. Meursault then refuses a chaplain’s visit because, though at different times and under different circumstances, the fact that everybody dies renders life obsolete.

Given Meursault’s unreliable narration and narrative interiority, The Stranger proves challenging to adapt. While the first-person novella suggests Meursault’s attitudes and philosophies brand him the titular stranger, François Ozon—in his new film, The Stranger (or L’Étranger in French)—uses the sights and sounds of Algiers to demonstrate the extent to which Meursault’s circumstances rely on his status as a settler and to highlight how this settler status renders Meursault an outsider. Camus permits Meursault to define Algiers, but for Ozon, Algiers defines—and singles out—Meursault. By emphasizing Meursault’s identity as a Pied Noir,¹ Ozon renders literal the label of “stranger” and interrogates a settler’s capacity to fully integrate within their “chosen” society and, toward the end of the film, their native one.

While Camus opens the book with a specific moment in Meursault’s life, Ozon opens the film with Meursault’s specific moment in history. From the first scene to the admittedly heavy-handed use of the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” during the credits, Ozon reminds us of the extent to which The Stranger relies on time and place. Before Meursault, we see old news clips selling Algeria as a traveling or settling destination, and rather than following the novella in chronological order, Ozon depicts the events before his arrest as a flashback. A French voice-over praises the country and its history as we see photos and videos of Algerian passages and locals. This choice marks a notable departure from the novella: Not only is “Mother died today” one of the most recognizable opening lines in literature, but the documentary footage immediately implicates the film within the colonial context. The death of Mrs. Meursault is an arbitrary, one-time occurrence that affects her circle, whereas the colonization of Algeria had been occurring for over a century by the time the events of The Stranger take place. In the following scene, we get Meursault’s first dialogue. A fellow inmate asks Meursault what he did, and Meursault replies in French, “I killed an Arab.” Like the novella, the film introduces us to Meursault via a death, but Ozon’s entryway into Meursault is the death he actively causes. When he tells his boss he will attend his mother’s funeral, Meursault shrugs off his condolences: “It’s not my fault.”

This vague dismissal of his mother’s death contrasts with his direct acknowledgment of the Arab’s murder. Rather than saying that he killed a man, the fact that Meursault also specifies, in French, that he killed “an Arab” establishes a separation between him and the other inmates. Even in custody, Meursault is a Pied Noir before he is a prisoner.

A child of Pied Noirs himself, Camus believed it possible for French settlers and the native Algerians to coexist. Though the plot of The Stranger suggests otherwise, Ozon illustrates the root of the hostility. By depicting Meursault’s steady decline and showing how he is responsible for his own reversal of fortune, Ozon complicates Meursault’s strangeness and proves that being a stranger worked to his benefit until he refuses to assimilate with his own. The Stranger does offer a sympathetic depiction of the French, and armed with the last several decades of critical race theory and postcolonial discourse, Ozon places Meursault within this legacy and offers an interpretation of the story where one cannot separate the narrative’s intrigue from its historical context.

In Ozon’s The Stranger, Meursault dreams of his own execution. Two guards escort him through a vast desert toward a guillotine. He exchanges words with his mother, then, offscreen, the blade slices down before he wakes up in prison. Meursault’s dream materializes his contrasting realities: the empty, sandy desert represents an Orientalist image of North Africa, and the guillotine is a signifier for France. The guillotine has become as much a symbol of France in popular culture as the Eiffel Tower or a fresh baguette, and the guillotine, like Meursault, becomes a foreign arbiter of violence in Algeria. It is Meursault’s act of violence against an Algerian that propels the narrative, and all of the narrative’s major acts of violence—even Meursault’s execution or his friend Raymond’s abuse of his mistress—are committed by the Pied Noir characters. And while Meursault may be the stranger, these figures operate via violence because they are all, as Ozon illustrates, strangers.

Outside of prison, Ozon juxtaposes Meursault with his surroundings to demonstrate that a settler status, while elite, brands Meursault and his relations strangers in Algiers. We often see Meursault at the beach with his girlfriend, Marie. While other women are in niqabs, Marie wears Western bathing suits and shows her hair. Ozon casts no moral judgment on modesty or lack thereof, but he demonstrates regardless that Marie’s customs are not those of the natives. Ozon depicts Meursault and Marie in the sea, showing another facet of how the couple faces no literal or figurative restrictions within their movements and existence. Returning from the beach, Meursault and Marie kiss passionately on a bus, scandalizing a young Algerian boy. Ozon once again turns vulnerability into cultural dominance. A public display of affection becomes a marking of territory. Algiers becomes their domain, and their surroundings become as intimate as their own house.

While readers of the novella live in Meursault’s head, Ozon widens the lens and reminds us that Meursault hardly lives in his own world. As Pied Noirs, he and Marie follow customs the natives would find strange. Yet, in this colonial structure, it is the strangers who are the privileged. Before the incident at the beach, we follow Meursault as he enjoys this privileged life, but when he must face his own countrymen after his incarceration, Meursault transforms into a different sort of stranger. Among Pied Noirs, Meursault’s strangeness becomes the cause of his demise, rather than the source of his privilege.

Part 2 of The Stranger follows Meursault throughout his arrest, his trial, and the moments leading up to his execution, a stark contrast to the freedoms he enjoys in part 1. The first half of The Stranger takes place throughout several locations, showcasing the privileges Meursault enjoys in Algiers, while part 2 takes place almost entirely in a courtroom or in prison, exemplifying Meursault’s new lack of freedom.

Given that 1950s Algeria operated on the French judicial system, one would think that Meursault would have little difficulty obtaining an acquittal. Yet he dismisses any help and offers no explanations, and he antagonizes the jury. While Meursault’s strangeness facilitates his life in part 1, when faced with his own systems and people in part 2, his strangeness causes his demise.

At the beginning of his trial, prospects seem high for a positive outcome, but by failing to adhere to French social or legal conventions, Meursault practically sentences himself to death. A lawyer visits Meursault and explains that, thanks to French laws, Meursault has a right to representation, yet another reminder that Algeria is forced to operate under the systems of another country that exist to benefit people like Meursault. The lawyer is calm and behaves in a cordial manner. He assures Meursault that he is “neither the first nor the last” person to kill an Arab, minimizing the murder and treating court like a formality.

But despite the privileges he enjoys as a free man, Meursault is unable to be a Frenchman among his own people. Meursault’s lawyer tries in vain to help Meursault give acceptable answers, but Meursault’s inability to express remorse causes the jury to turn against him, and this behavior casts a darker light on Meursault than the murder. The jury remains silent during the descriptions of Meursault’s crime, but they gasp and scoff at his ambivalent explanations.

Meursault’s aloofness is also present during the first half of the film, but here, that aloofness translates into a dismissal of the legal system that is trying to acquit him. His crime is not the murder but an inability to appeal to his fellow Frenchmen. The jury finds Meursault guilty of ambivalence toward his own kind and his own customs, and in his last moments, Meursault proves them right.

Meursault’s final visitor is a prison chaplain, whom he dismisses in what is his only display of true anger. While this outburst can appear out of character, Ozon hints at this contempt from the start. Meursault’s mother requests a religious burial, and several shots depict other guests mourning with tears and prayers. Conversely, Meursault appears unfazed, a fact later used against him in court. This ambivalence might be characteristic, but one of the film’s final scenes recontextualizes Meursault’s reactions and reveals a deeper disdain. The chaplain offers spiritual guidance and implores Meursault to accept Christ before his execution, but Meursault grows increasingly hostile. The scene culminates in Meursault assaulting the chaplain and asserting that he knows more about life because he is so close to death.

In this scene, Meursault repeats two key actions. He once again resorts to violence, except now, it is on a fellow Pied Noir. And while Meursault’s reasoning for killing the Arab remains unclear, we know he assaults the chaplain out of anger toward the ideology he represents. The film furthermore begins and ends with Meursault confronting Catholicism. Even if Meursault is not as aggressive at his mother’s funeral, knowing how feels about the chaplain repaints his behavior at the funeral, and the ambivalence becomes contempt. Whether it be legal morality presented in the courtroom or the spiritual morality presented by the chaplain, Meursault rejects the Occidental structures that allow him the privileged life he leads before his arrest, and his failure to assimilate into these structures costs him his life.

Ozon suggests that, for better or for worse, it is the French colonization of Algeria that creates the conditions for Meursault’s signature strangeness.

As Ozon demonstrates, one can apply a postcolonial lens to Camus; he is certainly not the first to do so. In an attempt to restore the dignity of the Algerian characters, writer and journalist Kamel Daoud retells the story of The Stranger from the point of view of the murdered Arab’s brother in The Meursault Investigation. Furthermore, Assia Djebar’s short story collection Women of Algiers in Their Apartment interweaves the stories of three Muslim Algerian women and takes direct inspiration from Eugène Delacroix’s 19th-century Orientalist painting of the same name, reclaiming the concept of depicting the women of Algiers. As Algerian writers, Daoud and Djebar push back on French representations of Algeria, and by rewriting these narratives, they resist the colonization of art.

It is striking then to see Ozon, a French director, reframe The Stranger to interrogate colonialism in the narrative and how that presence affects perceptions of Meursault. Combined with Camus’s signature existentialism, Ozon suggests that, for better or for worse, it is the French colonization of Algeria that creates the conditions for Meursault’s signature strangeness.

“The Arab” might be an all-encompassing epithet, but so is “the stranger,” which is how we come to know Meursault before even reading the book or watching the movie. The Arab is defined by how he is perceived by others, and Ozon demonstrates that ultimately, so is Meursault. Camus alienates Algerians in the novel by way of near omission, but by placing him front and center, Ozon makes an alien out of Meursault.