Existentialist Cinema Makes a Surprising Comeback with New Adaptations
In an era dominated by social media superficiality and algorithmic homogenization, existentialist cinema is staging an unexpected return. François Ozon's fresh adaptation of Albert Camus' seminal novel The Stranger emerges as a towering monolith against the backdrop of vapid self-help culture. Published eighty-four years ago, this existentialist masterpiece was hardly at the top of Hollywood's revival list, trailing behind more commercial properties. Yet, its resurgence prompts a compelling question: is existentialism back in vogue, or is this merely a nostalgic farewell tour for angsty students seeking tattoo inspiration?
A Tasteful and Politically Charged Interpretation
Ozon's version marks a significant improvement over Luchino Visconti's 1967 attempt, Lo Straniero, the only other direct adaptation. Filmed in serene, aloof silvery monochrome, the new film offers a tasteful yet pointed interpretation. Newcomer Benjamin Voisin delivers a superb performance as the antihero Meursault, famously unmoved by his mother's death and attributing his murder of an Arab to the sun's glare. This Meursault is hard-edged in his nonconformism, evoking a sociopathic, colonial-era Patrick Bateman, contrasting with the book's sleepily acquiescent figure.
Ozon adopts a politically strident approach, recentering the narrative on colonial power relations from the prologue onward. This includes a chirpy newsreel-style propaganda film depicting Algiers as a "smooth blend of Occident and Orient." However, does this contemporary relevance suffice to rekindle the fires of existentialism, a philosophy that questions life's value and purpose in a godless universe? The mid-century world of turtleneck-clad Left Bank intellectuals like Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir now feels as distant as ancient Greece.
The Legacy of Existentialism in Film History
Existentialism has never made a direct, substantial impact on cinema, partly due to the scarcity of core fictional texts for adaptation. Sartre's Nausea and his Roads to Freedom trilogy remain unfilmed, while Camus' The Plague received a 1992 adaptation by Argentine director Luis Puenzo. Visconti's half-baked take on The Stranger featured Marcello Mastroianni in a theatrical and slack portrayal, failing to capture the novel's radicalism.
The French New Wave, with its hip young gunslingers, might have been expected to rally to existentialism's call for freedom and personal meaning. Films like The 400 Blows, Breathless, and Cléo from 5 to 7 showcase existentialist heroes charging toward an unknowable future. Directors such as Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais reflected splintered 20th-century psychology by breaking classical film grammar, though their experiments often leaned toward artistic sophistry rather than raw metaphysical revolution.
From Film Noir to Modern Existentialist Heroes
In the United States, émigré directors like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak packaged interwar European paranoia into hardboiled pop existentialism through film noir. The genre's terse gumshoes and hapless schemers, while lacking philosophical rigor, looked sharp navigating a senseless universe. The noir canon is rich with existentialist weariness, as seen in Ann Savage's femme fatale in Detour (1945).
This tradition extends to the existentialist hitman, an unbroken lineage from Alain Delon in Le Samouraï to modern films like Léon, Collateral, and David Fincher's recent The Killer. These characters patrol the frontier between life and death, often forced to question their purpose. This floundering existential heroism has become ubiquitous, from Travis Bickle's nocturnal odyssey in Taxi Driver to Blade Runner's replicants and Christopher Nolan's fragmented labyrinths.
Political Focus and Existential Roots in Ozon's Adaptation
Ozon's The Stranger emphasizes anticolonial politics, a departure from Camus' novel, which treats racial disparities with the same mute acceptance as other absurdities. In the film, elements like a "No natives" sign outside the cinema and the naming of the victim on a headstone bring colonial issues to the forefront. While politically inarguable, this moralizing approach detracts from the story's subjective and existential roots, focusing on individual purpose in the world.
Abstract existential preoccupations have often been dismissed as sixth-form navel-gazing, with Sartre's dictum "existence precedes essence" now resembling a perfume ad slogan. Yet, existentialism's spark persists, offering austere individuality as a counter to algorithmically homogenized influencers and ideas. In today's capitalist hellscape and geopolitical turmoil, the search for authentic moral bearings feels more relevant than ever.
Sirāt and the Existentialist Tightrope
Another recent film, Olivier Laxe's Oscar-nominated Sirāt, captures the existentialist tightrope with striking intensity. Set in north African spaces that free Europeans to reinvent themselves, the film opens with a hadith about a bridge between heaven and hell, "thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword." Sergi López's desperate father, searching for his lost daughter, loses his bearings after a mountain pass calamity, with life and death hinging on a single step.
Sirāt implies an imminent third world war, suggesting we are all navigating a minefield—geopolitically, technologically, economically, and emotionally. While Meursault embraces absurdity in The Stranger, Sirāt proposes dancing through the chaos, echoing Nietzsche's proto-existentialist wisdom that a philosopher should aspire to be "a good dancer." As The Stranger hits UK cinemas on 10 April, it serves not as a quaint throwback but as a cultural Rosetta Stone, illuminating the origins of our metaphysical questing in an increasingly fragmented world.
