Monthly Archives: April 2026

  • The Stranger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’Étranger

    François Ozon (2025)

    In the anglophone world at least, one part of the enduring interest of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel(la) is how its title should be translated into English.  The French title is richly ambiguous:  the word étranger can mean foreigner or stranger or outsider.  An English translator can’t avoid opting for one meaning in preference to the other two.  During the eighty-plus years since the book’s first publication, it seems The Outsider has been a more usual title in the UK and The Stranger preferred in North America.  My Penguin paperback of The Outsider (in a 1982 English translation by Joseph Laredo) includes an ‘Afterword’ by Camus, dated 8 January 1955, in which he wrote that ‘the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game.  In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives.’  That sentence would read oddly if ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ were substituted for ‘outsider’ – one bit of evidence in favour of translating L’Étranger as The Outsider.  Even so, the first cinema version of L’Étranger was released in English-speaking countries as The Stranger.  The same goes for the latest, third film adaptation of the novel, by François Ozon.

    Ozon is, remarkably, the first French director to bring L’Étranger to the cinema screen.  Luchino Visconti made the first film, Lo Straniero (1967), without changing the story’s Algiers setting or the principals’ names and nationalities, though Marcello Mastroianni played Meursault, who also acquired a forename (Arthur) that he doesn’t have in the original.  In Yazgı (2021), Zeki Demirkubuz went further, with a Turkish setting and characters:  in Yazgı (the title translates as Fate), Meursault is renamed Musa.  I haven’t seen either film so can’t say how otherwise faithful or unfaithful to the novel they may be.  Ozon, who wrote the screenplay for his version, is faithful to Camus in many respects, yet his departures from the original make a crucial difference.

    His film opens with black-and-white footage of 1930s Algiers, complete with upbeat tinny music and an enthusiastic voiceover proclaiming the city’s charms and virtues.  There are soon discordant images, though.  A group of Arab youths stare unsmilingly at the camera.  Graffiti on a wall promotes an Algerian liberation movement, while white citizens display banners declaring allegiance to France.  If this isn’t authentic archive material, it’s extraordinarily skilful pastiche, in terms of both the images’ visual texture and the accompanying soundtrack.  It also enables Ozon to segue seamlessly into the narrative proper:  his whole film is in monochrome.  In place of the novel’s memorable opening sentences – ‘Mother died today.  Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know’ – we see Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) marched by two guards down a prisoner corridor and placed in a crowded cell.  Its other occupants are all Arabs, one of whom asks what Meursault’s crime is:  his reply, also his opening line, is, ‘I killed an Arab’.  Ozon’s scene-setting newsreel is his chief addition to the novel’s text and immediately revealing that Meursault’s in prison for homicide his main adjustment of Camus’ narrative sequence.  (Readers of L’Étranger learn about the killing when it happens, halfway through the book.)  Yet these changes, in combination with Ozon’s almost complete eschewal of Meursault’s first-person narration, affect everything that follows in The Stranger.

    In the novel, the man shot dead by Meursault on a beach near Algiers, is referred to only as ‘the Arab’.  The man’s sister, whose relationship with Meursault’s friend and neighbour Raymond Sintès, is the catalyst for the fateful events on the beach, is also unnamed.  By keeping these two nameless, Camus both illustrates Meursault’s emotional disengagement and makes a political point about how the wider French colonial community in Algeria viewed the country’s indigènes.  A politically aware filmmaker of today may well feel a need to make that point more explicitly, and Ozon certainly does so, from start to finish.  The film’s title comes up on the screen first in Arabic, then in French.  The sister of the man killed by Meursault is named as soon as she appears.  The closing sequence features not Meursault but this young woman, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), on the beach where her brother died.  The camera stops and moves closer to his memorial stone, which bears a name, Moussa Hamdani.

    Ozon may well be referencing here The Meursault Investigation, a 2013 novel by Algerian author Kamel Daoud, whose recasting of L’Étranger has the story told by the brother of the dead Arab.  The latter’s name is Musa, which is a common variant of Moussa.  (It’s striking, and perhaps not a coincidence, that Meursault became Musa in the Turkish film adaptation of L’Étranger.)  In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kamel Daoud explained that:

    ‘Ever since the Middle Ages, the white man has the habit of naming Africa and Asia’s mountains and insects, all the while denying the names of the human beings they encounter. By removing their names, they render banal murder and crimes. By claiming your own name, you are also making a claim of your humanity and thus the right to justice.’

    Not many readers of the original L’Étranger can have found the anonymous Arab’s death ‘banal’, and Daoud’s words seem very unfair to Albert Camus.  They nevertheless give a sense of the cultural pressure that Ozon probably felt in adapting the book.  I don’t think the attention he gives this aspect of the material yields any artistic benefits for The Stranger, but at least his post-colonial correctness doesn’t submerge Ozon’s shrewd wit.  His choice of music to accompany The Stranger’s closing credits is the Cure’s L’Étranger-inspired 1978 debut single ‘Killing an Arab’ which, apart from anything else, supplies an up-tempo contrast to the pace at which The Stranger has moved.  All in all, though, the salience of ethnicity here may get you thinking that ‘The Foreigner’ might have been the right English title for Ozon’s film.

    This aspect of his changes is, however, less of a problem than the consequences of telling the story without Meursault’s voice (most of the time anyway).  As usual, it’s laudable, in theory, that a film director has resisted the option of replicating a novel’s first-person narrative by relying on persistent voiceover.  But Meursault’s feeling – or lack of feeling – about the events he describes is fundamental to L’Étranger as a philosophical novel and excising his voice adds greatly to the challenge of realising his character on screen.  The film’s predominantly slow tempo and unstressed editing (by Clément Selitzki) are presumably designed to reflect Meursault’s perception of what happens in the world as desultory and inconsequential.  These devices aren’t ineffective, but they can only take Ozon so far in conveying Meursault’s state of mind.  A viewer may well feel the film is dragging.  That falls some way short of our sharing or understanding the protagonist’s ennui.

    How old is Meursault?  He doesn’t reveal his age but I’m probably not the only reader to see him as a kind of twin of the man who created him.  Camus was twenty-eight when L’Étranger was first published – exactly the age that Benjamin Voisin is now.  When Visconti set out to make Lo Straniero, he had Alain Delon in mind for the lead.  Ozon has said he regrets Delon didn’t end up playing it and Marcello Mastroianni, who’d just turned forty, does strike you as a bit old for the part.  Even so, I’m not sure Delon, a decade younger, would have been more right for it, and not just because, though both were fine actors, Mastroianni was the finer.  It’s important to the story that Meursault’s outlook on life feels settled – that it’s not an expression of youthful inexperience.  Mastroianni’s maturity may have helped in that respect, whereas Delon as a young actor tended to a quicksilver, sometimes brittle quality.  Mastroianni’s relative bulk and ability to project languor also seem naturally better suited to the story’s prevailing atmosphere.

    The three main actors in The Stranger have already worked with Ozon:  Pierre Lottin (Raymond) in By the Grace of God (2018) and When Autumn Falls (2024); Rebecca Marder, who plays Meursault’s girlfriend Marie, in The Crime is Mine (2023); and Benjamin Voisin in Summer of 85 (2020).  As Meursault, Voisin leaves you in no doubt of his acting talents, yet he gives the wrong impression.  (You wonder if Ozon had what-might-have-been with Alain Delon on his mind in casting Voisin.)   This Meursault does seem immature.  He has the air of a dissatisfied student, who has learned about existentialism from books as much as from personal experience.  Voisin’s Meursault seems a bored bohemian, who’d fit better in a Left Bank café than in a mundane office job in Algiers.  He’s so habitually stony-faced and taciturn that, for example, Meursault’s failure to show grief at his mother’s funeral is too remarkable even as you watch the funeral.  His lack of emotion should, rather, be more vaguely recalled by those who observed it, turning into evidence used against Meursault at his trial for murder.

    You don’t blame Benjamin Voisin for this:  he has little option when, throughout the film’s first half, Meursault is almost completely deprived of a voice.  Voisin’s reticence works well in scenes where there’s little or no need for words.  When Meursault is sunbathing or swimming with Marie, or they’re having sex, Voisin suggests that, while these are Meursault’s most pleasurable experiences, he’s still going through the motions in partaking of them.  It’s a relief when Ozon introduces Meursault’s voiceover at the climax to the pivotal beach encounter with Djemila’s brother (Abderrahmane Dehkani).  This passage in the book, culminating in Meursault’s acte gratuit in shooting the man, is one of the most visually potent and sensorily memorable in any novel I know.  Ozon reproduces it admirably, with the great help of Manu Dacosse’s atmospheric cinematography and Voisin’s well-judged reading of Meursault’s words.  Yet hearing those words reminds you of what you’ve been missing in The Stranger.  In its second hour, the film is less costive.  We’re not taken back inside Meursault’s head until the final stages, where (as you expect once Ozon has allowed himself that first piece of voiceover) Voisin reads the novel’s last words, in which Meursault accepts ‘the benign indifference of the world’ and anticipates his execution.  Meursault also, necessarily, has somewhat more to say in this second half, in court and when the prison chaplain (Swann Arlaud) visits him in the condemned cell, insists on hearing Meursault’s thoughts and gets more than he bargained for.

    In the small but important role of the chaplain, Swann Arlaud is, as usual, excellent (as he also was in Ozon’s By the Grace of God).  The supporting parts are well cast and played.  Pierre Lottin is particularly good as the blowhard Raymond, Meursault’s pal who is also Djemila’s pimp and abuser.  As might be expected, Denis Lavant makes a strong impression:  he’s the elderly Salamano, another of Meursault’s neighbours, who beats his mangy old dog but is bereft without it.  (Camus devised some fascinating names.  Salamano, with its suggestion of dirty hands, seems to prefigure Sartre’s 1948 play, Les mains sales.  Meursault is even more expressive, with its hints of an agent’s leap to death – je meurs, je saute – or, more simply, the character’s liking of la mer.  In the posthumously published novel A Happy Death, written before L’Étranger, Camus’ main character is also Mersault – that is, with the first ‘u’ of his famous successor’s name missing.  Mersault is close to an anagram of Albert Camus – add ABC, and it’s a complete anagram!)

    There’s so much in Ozon’s The Stranger that’s admirable:  what’s happening around Meursault at his mother’s funeral; his cinema visit with Marie, to see a Fernandel comedy that makes her laugh but not him; how the visuals evoke different effects of heat, from soothing to bewildering; Fatima Al Qaddiri’s insinuating and unsettling music.  All that’s missing – but it matters so much – is a protagonist who is more than a camera subject, who has real internal life.  This makes for a hole at The Stranger’s heart, yet you never doubt François Ozon’s purpose and ambition in taking on the formidable challenge of recreating Camus’ great book on the cinema screen.

    29 March 2026

     

  • What’s New, Pussycat?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clive Donner (1965)

    It gets off to a great start with the Bacharach-David title song over Richard Williams’ animated credits.  Although the song’s lyrics and arrangement are dynamically OTT, its melody is yearning; the whole thing is wonderfully delivered by Tom Jones.  The Williams animations are amusingly zippy and zany.  These first two or three minutes are probably the most satisfying in the whole film.  What’s New, Pussycat? now has historical interest – this was Woody Allen’s first screenplay and screen appearance, and Peter O’Toole’s first comic role in cinema.  But whereas the opening titles and music transport you to the 1960s enjoyably, the nearly two-hour film that follows does the same in a bad way.  Directors entrusted with big Hollywood comedies of the era boasting starry international casts must have been under instructions to knock the audience dead using a bludgeon.  Like The Pink Panther (1963), for example, What’s New, Pussycat? is tiresomely frenetic.

    O’Toole is Michael James, editor of a fashion magazine in Paris.  Michael is irresistibly attractive to and irresistibly attracted by beautiful women.  Because it’s hard to remember so many names, Michael tends to address nearly every one of them as ‘pussycat’.  But he does want to be faithful to his fiancée, Carole (Romy Schneider), and seeks help from psychoanalyst Dr Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers) on how to succeed.  Fassbender is largely distracted in his own romantic pursuit of another of his patients, Renée (Capucine) – a vain pursuit since she’s chasing Michael and can’t stand Fassbender.  Michael’s one male friend, neurotic Victor Shakapopolis (Woody Allen), is another hopeless romantic in the sense that he’s hopeless when it comes to romance – until Carole has the idea of briefly flirting with Victor to make Michael jealous and consequently, she hopes, more loyal.  Michael gets accidentally involved, nevertheless, with exotic dancer Liz Bien (Paula Prentiss) and parachutist Rita (Ursula Andress).  The only woman interested in Fassbender is his formidable wife Anna (Eddra Gale), whom he loathes.

    There’s good stuff from Peter O’Toole and Woody Allen.  At first, O’Toole is a bit too eager to make clear he’s not just a serious actor, but he soon proves his comic gifts.  So tall and slim that he’s a ready-made cartoon, he moves at terrific speed, speaks just as quickly and does both with bracing dexterity.  Even on his debut, Woody Allen is Woody Allen but he, too, has a few bits of exuberant physical comedy that now seem surprising, when Victor tries to impress Carole with his carnal and cultural appetites.  Up close and personal with her, he puts opera on the record-player as an aphrodisiac accompaniment.  He’s repeatedly interrupted by a succession of people knocking on the bedroom door.  Each time, he pauses the record then restarts it and leaps almost acrobatically (for Woody anyway) back to Carole’s side on the bed.  Allen’s script includes, as well as some fine one-liners, a couple of nicely surreal visual gags:  even though this is the 1960s, the figure of Toulouse-Lautrec walks across shot to take his seat outside a Paris café, at a table shared with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Emile Zola.

    Toulouse-Lautrec also gets mentioned, as Victor’s ‘favourite small man’ – a subject with which Woody Allen is already preoccupied.  It’s one of several examples of What’s New, Pussycat?’s self-referential side, which indulges the main male egos involved.  The results can be funny, as in a parody Cyrano de Bergerac sequence where Michael tries to help Fassbender woo Renée, who appears at the window of her top-floor apartment.  Although O’Toole raises laughs here, he’s making fun of his own reputation as a superlative speaker of verse, and Michael James’ own line of work is forgotten (it counts for very little throughout the film).  In another scene, at the bar of a strip club, Michael briefly meets with an uncredited Richard Burton, with whom O’Toole had just co-starred in Becket, released in the year that also saw Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s (first) wedding.  ‘Haven’t you met me somewhere before?’ asks Burton.   The reply from O’Toole (rather than Michael) is, ‘I can remember the name, but I can’t place the face …remember me to what’s-her-name’.

    The ego-in-chief, though, is Peter Sellers.  When Anna catches her husband in a compromising situation with Ursula Andress’s Rita, Fassbender’s scornful riposte is that the latter is ‘a personal friend of James Bond’.  This weedy Dr No joke was supposedly ad-libbed but Sellers, according to Woody Allen, was determined to have the lion’s share of the script’s best lines.  You may also suspect that Sellers insisted on how he should look – he wears a long-haired black wig and consistently bizarre clothes.  His appearance and involved Teutonic accent warn potential funny-man rivals in the cast:  comic genius at work, do not disturb.  Peter Sellers gives a disastrous performance, nearly laugh-free.

    It seems remarkable in retrospect that What’s New, Pussycat? found favour with three demanding, and very different, American critics of the time – Pauline Kael, Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris.  Perhaps a ‘psychiatric farce’, as Kael describes it, was then still enough of a novelty to give the film a progressive flavour.  I often don’t really understand Farber and that’s certainly the case when he writes that ‘Clive Donner’s direction gets a hardness of line, a whiplike individuality by compressing his actresses into a murderously confined space’.  Andrew Sarris reported in The Village Voice that ‘I have now seen What’s New Pussycat? four times, and each time I find new nuances in the direction, the writing, the playing, and, above all, the music’.  I think life’s too short to test if Sarris’s claim works for me, too.

    Although both male critics were more enthusiastic than Kael about the film, neither they nor she betrayed the least concern about how women are used in What’s New, Pussycat?  It now looks alarmingly dated in this respect and being untroubled seems to date these three critics also.  Sex-bomb Ursula Andress’s performing name is her real name, which is just as well.  Otherwise, you might – on the basis of her Venus Anadyomene debut in Dr No (1962) and Pussycat – take the surname as a jokey pun on ‘undress’:  she spends most of her screen time here in skimpy underwear.  Brainy, gifted people were involved in Clive Donner’s film yet it operates according to the same formula as the Carry Ons.  Men are insatiable sex maniacs, though often thwarted and vulnerable.  Women are babes or battleaxes, their function either to take their clothes off and drive the men even crazier or bully them.  In What’s New, Pussycat?, Anna Fassbender is eventually kitted out in a Valkyrie costume, complete with horned helmet, and wields a spear.

    It’s to Romy Schneider’s credit that, thanks to her coherent but nuanced comic playing, Carole comes across as a woman rather than a male fantasy figure.  Schneider also has chemistry with Peter O’Toole.  In the closing stages, though, nobody has a chance against the film’s hyperactive mayhem.  The climax, involving everyone who’s anyone in the story, is a high-speed go-karting sequence that seems interminable until it ends quite arbitrarily.  I’m with Andrew Sarris on the music only if he means just the theme song.  Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote three numbers for the film, the other two sung by Paul Jones and Dionne Warwick.  These, or snatches of them, are slipped into the narrative irrelevantly.  You barely register Paul Jones at all.  You hear Dionne Warwick only because her voice is so naturally distinctive.  The (ab)use of these songs and their performers is typical of What’s New, Pussycat?’s squandering of talent.

    28 March 2026

     

     

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