Cedric Klapisch’s Colours of Time should be a typical opening night crowd pleaser at this year’s Alliance Francaise French Film Festival – a film that playfully skips between Belle Epoque Paris and the present.

However, the best film in the program this year is without a doubt director Francois Ozon’s adaptation of Nobel laureate Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, The Stranger, one of the most read French novels worldwide.

Ozon’s film has already garnered awards for best film, best actor (Benjamin Voisin) and best cinematographer (Manuel Dacosse) in The Lumiere Awards (France’s Golden Globes), while Voisin, Dacosse and supporting actor Pierre Lottin have been nominated in the Cesars (the French Oscars).

Set in 1930s Algiers and beautifully shot in Morocco, black-and-white film The Stranger follows the unassuming and mysterious office worker Mersault (Voisin), who keeps his emotions to himself. He doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral and when he becomes involved with Marie (Rebecca Marder), it’s mostly just for sex. When he kills an Arab man for no apparent reason he is sentenced to death, partly because he seems to show no remorse, let alone grief at his mother’s funeral.

Voisin, 29, who rose to fame playing a sexy rebellious bad boy in Ozon’s 2020 film Summer of 85, has already had a strong career starring in 2021’s Lost Illusions and playing another bad boy, a Napoleonic-era celebrity chef in the French-language series Careme, which streams on Apple TV+.

In re-teaming with Ozon, Voisin says he wanted to play something completely different. Ozon admires Voisin’s performance as Mersault because “it runs counter to his own nature, since in real life he is an extrovert, and I would often ask him to be silent, to observe and to be withdrawn”.

“This role was totally different from the roles I’m used to playing, because usually I prepare a lot,” Voison says. “I read a lot about my character, I want to get familiar with him, I want to know where he comes from, what he does, what are his targets, his objective in life.

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“But here, there was nothing. I didn’t even read Camus’ descriptions of my character. So, I had to strike a fine balance between Mersault and myself. Sometimes when I was on set, I wouldn’t even listen to others. For example, during the trial, I was there for three days without listening to what other people were saying, which is very strange, because in real life when you are on trial you are listening to others.”

Playing such introspection proved draining.

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“It took more out of me than a role where I had to jump, fight or run,” Voisin admits. “Doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, is intensely physical. At the end of each day of shooting, I was utterly exhausted!”

There is a strong romantic chemistry between Rebecca Marder and Voisin, who had only briefly previously met at parties.

“I was thinking, oh, Ben’s a partier or I don’t know what he’s like,” Marder recalls. “But when we started working, I found he was really a deep thinker and a hard worker, so I felt we would be a good match.

“When we arrived in Tangiers, we began the shoot with the intimate scenes, the central part of the couple. It was good to begin with this because as the shoot went on Ben became more and more the character. So, he was disappearing.”

Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall) is one of several actors doing double duty at the festival. After portraying a victim of clergy abuse in Ozon’s 2018 film, By the Grace of God, he now plays the prison chaplain in The Stranger.

Arlaud also takes a major role in Stephan Demoustier’s The Great Arch, as Jean-Louis Subilon, the French architect who took over from Claes Bang’s Danish architecture teacher, Otto von Spreckelsen, who had surprised the world when he won an open-call competition to design the Great Arch of La Defense, one of Paris’s most fascinating structures.

Two of France’s liveliest and most charismatic actresses Laure Calamy and Elodie Bouchez star in the satirical The Party’s Over, which will surely appeal to Australian audiences. They play women from different sides of the track. Bouchez is the owner of a holiday mansion with her obnoxious husband, Laurent Lafitte, while Calamy and her husband Ramzy Bedia are caretakers of the property. The two couples are at loggerheads and it’s enormous fun to watch.

Calamy has a second festival film, What is Love?, co-starring Vincent Macaigne, while in the coming-of-age drama Enzo, Bouchez plays the mother of the 16-year-old under-achieving protagonist who struggles with his romantic feelings for Romanian Vlad.

Laurent Lafitte, memorable as Isabelle Huppert’s neighbour in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, is again alongside Huppert in The Richest Woman in the World, loosely based on the 2010 Bettencourt Affair involving Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress of the L’Oreal empire.

Other famous French actresses appear in some of the best films. Call My Agent! star Camille Cottin delivers a strong performance in Out of Love, as a woman who never wanted children but must care for her young niece and nephew after her sister disappears.

In the sumptuously filmed The Ice Tower, Oscar winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) plays a mysterious movie star shooting an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Snow Queen.

Lea Drucker is her usual steely self in Dominik Moll’s gripping crime drama Case 137.

Hollywood actresses make their presence felt as well. Jodie Foster speaks fluent French in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, while Angelina Jolie stars in Alice Winocour’s Couture, where her filmmaker character is diagnosed with breast cancer during Paris Fashion Week.

If it’s a French action blockbuster you’re after, you can never go past filmmaker Cedric Jimenez. He even worked with Aussies Jason Clarke and Mia Wasikowska on his 2017 English-language Nazi story, The Man With the Iron Heart (available on Prime).

Jimenez had huge success in France with 2020’s Bac Nord (The Stronghold) and 2022’s November, which focussed on the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.

Gilles Lellouche starred in Bac Nord with Adele Exarchopoulos and now they play cops in Jimenez’s adrenalin-charged dystopian action thriller Dog 51, which was a French box-office hit – the biggest of any film at the festival.  In an almost unrecognisable Paris of the future the pair are hunting down a killer as they battle the all-controlling ALMA, a powerful predictive AI which has revolutionised the police system.

Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema. She is a voting member of the Lumiere Awards.

The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival runs from March 3 to April 26 across Australia.

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