By Ben Croll

Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) is a man of little words and fewer deeds. He idles away, smoking, brooding and gazing at the world with zen-like detachment, barely shedding a tear at his mother’s funeral or lifting a hand against injustice. Then he kills a man – an act whose hazy motivation has fueled debate in classrooms and book clubs since Albert Camus published “The Stranger” in 1942. 

François Ozon, by contrast, is anything but inert. For decades he has worked at a relentless clip, writing, directing, producing and promoting a new film each year, now bringing his latest to Venice. And yet entrusting France’s most-read modern novel to its most prolific filmmaker is less obvious than it first appears. Camus’ work endures precisely because of its elusive (and allusive) quality – its celebrated interiority more conducive to interpretation than to adaptation.