Let’s get metaphysical! Existentialist cinema is back, if anyone cares
The philosophy was embraced by film noir, the French New Wave and modern hitmen questioning life’s purpose. Now dust off your turtlenecks, for Sirāt and a new version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger look set to make ennui on-trend again
“For it all to be consummated, to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a big crowd on the day of my execution, and for them to greet me with cries of hate.” The lacerating signoff of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger isn’t a collection of words you’ll see appearing as life advice in some influencer’s Instagram caption any time soon. In the age of vapid social media self-help, François Ozon’s new film adaptation of the existentialist masterpiece rears up like a great monolith. Eighty-four years after the novel was published, that’s rather unexpected; as far as IP goes, L’Étranger (The Stranger) was probably some way behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on the film industry’s revival list. Does this mean that existentialism is suddenly back in vogue? Or is the film just a farewell tour for every angsty student’s favourite source of tattoo quotes?
It should be said that Ozon’s version is a big improvement on Luchino Visconti’s ill-conceived 1967 stab at Camus’s novel, Lo Straniero (the only other direct adaptation). Filmed in serenely aloof silvery monochrome, the new film is a tasteful but pointed interpretation. Newcomer Benjamin Voisin is superb in the lead as antihero Meursault, who is famously unmoved by his mother’s death and says the sun’s glare is what makes him shoot an Arab. This Meursault is hard-edged in his nonconformism, coming across at times like a sociopathic, colonial-era Patrick Bateman, next to the book’s sleepily acquiescent figure. And Ozon is on politically strident form, recentring the story on colonial power relations from the prologue onwards – which features a chirpy newsreel-style propaganda film about Algiers’ “smooth blend of Occident and Orient”.
But is that enough contemporary relevance to rekindle the fires of existentialism, the philosophy that questioned the value and purpose of life in the absence of God? The mid-century world of turtle-necked Left Bank pontificators such as Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir now feels as exotic and far-off as ancient Greece. The Stranger’s light prose made it a French GCSE staple – but also a gateway drug to mainlining the likes of Dostoyevsky, Kerouac and Salinger, and other existentialist-adjacent required reading needed to graduate as a pretentious alienated teen. For most modern functioning adults, navigating a meaningless universe is what happens when your GPS loses reception. God may be dead – but the new religion of tech has arrived with new promises of eternity. Existentialism would seem to have reached its best-by date.
The philosophy never did make much of a direct impact on cinema, partly because there were relatively few core fictional texts to adapt. Sartre’s Nausea and his Roads to Freedom trilogy have never had feature-length adaptations; of Camus’s other major works, only The Plague has been filmed, in 1992 by Argentine director Luis Puenzo. In Visconti’s half-baked take on The Stranger, Marcello Mastroianni feels both theatrical and slack as Meursault, completely fumbling the novel’s radicalism. Though not a card-carrying existentialist, the similarly alienated Kafka has been treated better by cinema, with multiple adaptations of Metamorphosis and The Castle – and the high point of Orson Welles’ nightmarish 1962 spin on The Trial, which like The Stranger is about a man held hostage by society’s arbitrary standards.
You would have expected the hip young gunslingers of the French New Wave to have rallied to existentialism’s call to embrace freedom and pursue your own meaning – and to some extent they did. The 400 Blows’ defiant truant, or Breathless’s mile-a-minute hoodlum, or the agitated singer waiting for her cancer test results in Cléo from 5 to 7, can all be saluted as existentialist heroes hitting the ground running towards an unknowable future. Breaking apart classical film grammar and playing cinematic jazz with the pieces was Godard, Truffaut and Resnais’s way of reflecting splintered 20th-century psychology. But at times these experiments felt more like artistic sophistry concerned with picking at cinematic conventions than a raw metaphysical revolution bending outwards back towards life.
In the US, émigré directors including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak packaged up interwar European paranoia – and the nihilist artistic and philosophical undercurrents swirling around it – into hardboiled pop existentialism: film noir. The genre’s terse gumshoes, hapless schemers and sketchy drifters might have been short on philosophical rigour, but looked invariably sharp getting sucked into the quagmire of a senseless universe. (The Bogart-esque Camus, in the famous photograph of him smoking in a popped collar, also looked as if he’d just stepped out from interrogating some heavy-duty dame.)
And the noir canon is packed with one-liners freighted with existentialist weariness: “Life’s like a ballgame. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it’s the ninth inning,” says Ann Savage’s femme fatale in the 1945 B-movie classic Detour. Jutting out from noir is the figure of the existentialist hitman – an unbroken lineage from Alain Delon in Le Samouraï to the likes of Léon, Collateral and David Fincher’s recent The Killer. Sentinels patrolling the frontier between life and death, they’ve got a bad habit of ending up on the hitlist themselves and being forced to question their central purpose.
Setting its compass by noir’s unstable bearings, this floundering existential heroism became the water we swim in. It is everywhere: in Travis Bickle’s queasy nocturnal odyssey in Taxi Driver, Blade Runner’s replicants agonising over their programmed obsolescence, Jim Carrey searching for the door to real life in The Truman Show, Christopher Nolan’s many wanderers in his fragmented movie-labyrinths. So the return of The Stranger to cinemas isn’t so much a quaint throwback as being presented with a cultural Rosetta Stone, allowing us to better understand where this type of metaphysical questing stems from.
That said, with its political focus, is Ozon’s take strictly existentialist? Camus’s novel is not overtly anticolonialist; in fact, the same mute acceptance applies to racial disparities in his Algeria as to other absurdities in life. When the killer Meursault is dumped into a cell full of Arabs: “They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I’d done. I told them that I’d killed an Arab and there was silence.” In the new film, the anticolonialism is front and centre, from the sign reading “No natives” outside the cinema, to the closing shot, in which the book’s anonymous victim is finally named on his headstone.
The politics are inarguable – but it feels as if Ozon is redeeming Camus’s story with the kind of moralising overtones Meursault rejects in both the courtroom seeking to “explain” his personality and the priest who finally tries to salvage him through Christianity. The director does his part with regard to the ongoing examination of the west’s colonial past. But the film’s pep talk detracts from the story’s true subjective and existential roots, of our purpose as individuals in the world.
Such abstract preoccupations were long ago written off as sixth-form navel-gazing. These days, Sartre’s famous dictum, existence precedes essence, reads more like a perfume ad slogan. But existentialism’s spark isn’t quite snuffed out yet. Its creed of austere individuality should have renewed appeal in the face of the hordes of algorithmically homogenised influencers, art and ideas. And doesn’t the search for authentic moral bearings amid chaos sound frankly on the money as the current capitalist hellscape and geopolitical pile-on carry on intensifying?
One other recent film captures the feeling of walking the existentialist tightrope better than most – set, like The Stranger, in the north African spaces that seemed to free Europeans to be something else. Olivier Laxe’s Oscar-nominated rave parable Sirāt opens with a hadith about the bridge between heaven and hell, that is “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword”. A path its troupe of desert ravers must of course walk, most of all Sergi López’s desperate father, who is searching for his lost daughter. After a calamity on a mountain pass, he loses his bearings completely; as he stumbles around in agony, the difference between life and death in the film’s climax comes down to a single step. The anxiety and the nausea – the existentialists’ two favourite things – are overwhelming.
Sirāt’s implied backdrop is an imminent third world war. We’re all in the minefield now is what Laxe seems to be saying – geopolitically, technologically, economically, emotionally – and must find a way forward. In The Stranger, Meursault chooses to embrace the absurdity of an impossible predicament; Sirāt suggests you can dance your way through (or at least go out with a bang). On the edge of the abyss, Nietzsche, that proto-existentialist, knew having the right moves was what counted: “I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer.”
The Stranger is released in UK cinemas on 10 April.