A PROPHETE (UN PROPHÈTE)
Jacques Audiard, director of the superb 2005 film, The Beat My Heart Skipped, took 2009’s Grand Prix at Cannes with this film about the evolution of a gangster. It is now nominated for a Foreign Language Academy Award. I won’t pick it to win because this, along with the documentary nominees, is to me, the strongest category of all the awards. In other words the competition is fierce, but this film would not be undeserving if it won, it is superb.
Audiard wanted to make an atypical gangster genre film: an anti-Scarface, as he called it, as he wasn’t interested elevating a crazy person. If you’re fascinated by criminal anti-heroes and organized crime syndicates, which I admit I am, this film has many of the markings: rival gangs jockeying for power, the one hero who rises to the top after much personal tribulation. But there are many things that make this film unique, distinctive in it’s approach to familiar material, first and foremost being that our hero is Arab, Malik El Dejebena (Tahar Rahim.)
When we meet Malik, he has been sentenced to six years in prison for attacking a police officer, but there is little else to know about him. He is a clean slate, with no history other than juvenile detention, no parents we know of. We see him being processed, he has nothing but a Euro that he tries to hide in his shoe. His initiation into prison life involves being rolled for his shoes, which does not go unnoticed by the “king” of the prison yard, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), the leader of the Corsican gang inside. Later, César offers his “protection” to Malik who he notices does not hang with the Arabs, but Malik must do a nasty job first.
With the casting of Tahar Rahim, a virtual unknown, we, the audience are free to attach ourselves, without any movie star baggage, to our hero as he wends his way through the criminal hierarchy. Something about his youthful and innocent visage makes us pull for him, hope for his redemption, despite the fact that almost immediately his and our moral center must shift. Early on, he is advised to “learn something” while in prison, and he takes the advice to heart, learning more than simply how to read and write in French. At the feet of César, who functions as the brutal father, he observes, oh so quietly, and remembers, everything. Like all heroes, his exceptional nature is obvious. He is destined to rise, and we will gladly accompany him on this journey, full of twists and turns. He is a mythic figure, as many film heroes aspire to be but few turn out to be.
Unlike Michael Corleone, we are not privy to his moral agony, nor is he struggling to make a life for himself and his family like Vito. But his rise is similarly operatic, if grittier, and much less visually seductive. Yet the film is seductive, in a non-classical manner. I’m not a big fan of handheld shooting but it does not distract here as it often does. Audiard had to construct a prison, within which we are trapped, like Malik for most of the film and clearly he decided to build tight spaces, so it’s a logical choice. When Malik does get outside on his day passes, engineered by César’s lawyer, we can all but feel the breeze as he stands on the beach in Marseille. Later when he checks back into prison, he looks in his shoe, turning out the sand that he carries back with him.
It is such moments of stunning visual and thematic subtlety, in the midst of the complex forward momentum of the story that make it quite uniquely magnificent. And there is Malik as hero. Audiard said that in French cinema, Arabs are either villains or examined in a social realist context. They are usually not the mythic anti-heroes of the gangster genre. In that sense, perhaps, he is doing something like what both the first Scarface and later the Godfather films wanted to do. In the 1920s and 30s, Italian Americans were much like the Arabs in France, feared and reviled “dark” foreigners, speaking a strange language, practicing an extreme faith (a very pagan influenced version of Roman Catholicism) and thought to have overwhelmingly criminal tendencies. Those two films asked us to identify with their central characters, men who rose to power based on hard-work, focus and determination to do whatever was necessary.
In the last moments of Audiard’s film, Malik is shown walking out of prison, redeemed. If there is any question that incarceration changes people for the better, well perhaps, but it does depend on what one’s definition of better is. And that is, after all, what we do love about crime films.
A Prophet opens February 12, 2010.
Directed by Jacques Audiard, based on an original idea by Abdel Raouf Dafri; screenplay by Thomas Bidegain and Jacques Audiard, after an original script by Abedel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit; Director of Photography, Stéphane Fontaine; edited by Juliette Welfling; music by Alexandre Desplat. Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 149 minutes.
With: Tahar Rahim (Malik El Djebena); Niels Arestrup (César Luciani); Adel Bencherif (Ryad); Reda Kateb (Jordi le gitan); and Hichem Yacoubi (Reyeb).
