Rabat – French director François Ozon takes on a new challenge with a film adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, or the Outsider (L’Étranger).
Production is scheduled to begin in April in Morocco, a country whose landscapes provide a natural setting for the novel’s Mediterranean backdrop, Vogue France reports.
Published in 1942, the literary masterpiece stands as a defining work of Francophone literature.
The novel follows Meursault, a man who approaches life with unsettling detachment.
After his mother’s death, he kills a man on a beach in Algiers. His trial focuses less on the crime than on his lack of emotion, making him a striking embodiment of Camus’ philosophy of the absurd.
The sun and heat in The Stranger fashion Meursault’s emotions and actions, with the novel´s cathartic murder happening under an oppressive and vertiginous sun.
Camus presents heat as an almost physical force, blurring discomfort and fate.
Perhaps Morocco’s sunlit landscapes were purposefully chosen to capture this intensity on screen as well as reinforce Meursault’s alienation and the novel’s themes.
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Translated into many languages, the novel ranks among the most widely read in the world, alongside big classics such as Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Le Petit Prince and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
This marks the second major adaptation of the novel, following Luchino Visconti’s 1967 film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina.
Ozon is shouldering a heavy responsibility to revisit, depict, and interpret Camus’s existential and absurd themes from a fresh perspective.
Meursault, the anti-hero whose infamous opening line, “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas” (“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”) has echoed through generations and remains one of literature’s most enigmatic figures.
The project remains largely under wraps, with no details on casting or additional crew.
As anticipation builds, Ozon prepares to bring one of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels back to the screen, with Morocco providing the backdrop for this new cinematic journey.
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