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Prophet, A
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| Year: |
2009
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Director: |
Jacques Audiard
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| Stars: |
Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Antoine Basler, Leila Bekhti, Peirre Leccia, Foued Nassah, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Slimane Dazzi, Rabah Loucif
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| Genre: |
Drama, Thriller |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is a nineteen-year-old criminal who after spending his life in and out of institutions has finally been sent to prison for a six year sentence. Once he gets there, in spite of him being a Frenchman of Arab descent he is not assigned a cell in the Arab part of the jail, and has to make do with spending time with the Corsican faction, or rather he doesn't because he has made up his mind to keep his head down and do his time keeping as low a profile as possible. Alas, his race makes him stand out, and he is picked on until the head of the Corsicans, crime lord César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) offers him a deal...
Even more than The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet was a major success for the filmmaker Jacques Audiard who in a short space of time had become a force to be reckoned with in French cinema, even though he had been part of the business for decades. Un Prophète, to give it the original title, was highly praised for its gritty realism and vivid depiction of prison as somewhere you'd have to be crazy to end up in: after seeing the first half hour of this you'd never break the law again, not even a minor infraction. However, after that electrifiying opening section, not many admitted that the drama became bogged down in its lead character's progress up the food chain of the incarcerated.
But that initial part, where Malik is finding his feet, was certainly a fine way to start off, with César offering him a choice: he will give him protection if he carries out a favour for him, and if he doesn't agree, he will be killed. Malik tries to work out a way of escaping this fate, especially as the favour involves murdering a fellow prisoner and one of a rival gang to César's, but nothing he can do, not reasoning with his oppressors, not trying to contact the warden or getting thrown into solitary, will help him. The sequence where he visits the target's cell, ostensibly to perform sexual favours, is indeed a nailbiting example of tension, and immediately puts us on the side of Mailk as he is plainly terrified at where his life has taken him.
After this, the young man effectively becomes Luciani's lapdog, doing his bidding and knowing his place, yet there's a sense, and it's an all too predictable one, that his new mentor is inadvertantly grooming him as the next big thing in the criminal underworld. Malik learns his lessons well, and in spite of César and his heavies employing threats and violence to ensure they still rule the roost, their latest recruit has plans of his own, even if he doesn't quite realise it in the earlier stages. Rahim convincingly ages and grows up over the course of the film, which depicts the whole term of his sentence, although not in real time obviously. Mind you, by the latter half you might be forgiven for thinking it has been.
Yes, A Prophet is simply too longwinded and a snappier edit could have picked up the pace without sacrificing any of the production's better qualities. A curious, mystical take on Mailk's life emerges, as hinted at by the title, in that he has the power to foretell the future in his dreams, not something that happens often but you do notice it enough to wonder if there are religious parallels being drawn in his tale. Sadly, these are muddled at best, and you're better to regard this as a straight drama-cum-thriller as the protagonist slowly and steadily climbs the ladder of success, eventually becoming an important part of the drugs trade, not only in the prison but in the outside world as well as he secures day releases with which to do César's bidding, and then work out his own activities. Even though he embraces his new existence as a major figure in this environment, we never quite turn against Mailk because we have seen his struggle; it's just a pity that watching the film is a bit of a struggle as well. Music by Alexandre Desplat.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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