Frances’ entry for the Oscars and winner of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix award, there has also been much excitement about the critically acclaimed film A Prophet. Directed by Jacques Audiard (Self Made Hero, The Beat That My Heart Skipped), it is a disturbing and cynical portrayal about self-preservation in the hellhole of prison.
French-Arab Malik El Djebena (Rahim) is a homeless delinquent youth who has spent most of his life in juvenile prison. Sentenced to a six-year stretch and now, alongside the grown-ups, he tries hard to keep his head down. No such luck; Corsican mafia boss César Luciani (Arestrup) has other ideas and forces him to butcher fellow inmate, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoub). What ensues is a series of powerfully executed, gut-wrenching scenes.
From here, Malik becomes the lackey, committed to working for Luciani on the inside and later seeing to his outside interests after being awarded day release privileges. But Malik is no fool and all the while he is secretly taking care of his own sideline hash business whilst plotting his liberation from César’s gang.
A Prophet has a somewhat complicated plot that, at times, it is hard to follow, not that it matters too much, as it is the subtle peeks into Malik’s conscious that are the most touching of all. Audiard successfully exposes the protagonist's innocence and sense of regret with subtlety and aplomb. When he is to fly for the first time, wide-eyed at airport security, Malik sticks out his tongue during the routine passenger search, an instinctual habit after a lifetime of prison checks.
Like many of Audiard’s films, A Prophet is essentially about the rise of an underdog and Malik’s rise is a momentous one. We watch him struggle as he overcomes his illiteracy, with the help of his one true friend Ryard (Bencherif); and his joy when he is promoted from César’s skivvy to be his 'eyes and ears'.
But Malik is not a man of loyalties. Intuitive and astute, he has a deep sense of self-preservation. Confined within the claustrophobic concrete and steel prison walls where Muslims, Corsicans and Blacks hang out in their isolated gangs immersed in silent, charged conversations, he masterfully juggles relations. Despite César’s continuous vicious pummelling into total submission, Malik steadfastly maintains that he works for himself.
There is not much lacking in Audiard’s film with all the key ingredients to make an impactful crime film. He uses an array of stylistic techniques with frequent hallucinations, dream sequences, freeze frames and metaphors; and all without ever losing its sense of realism. It is a credit to Audiard that he can create empathy for a protagonist who, essentially, is a murderer and drug dealer. This is largely helped by the charismatic Tahar Rahim’s outstanding performance. It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that audiences are going to be transfixed.
