short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Monday, March 08, 2010

A Prophet (2009, France)

If the world of A Prophet even only somewhat related to the realities of prison life, there goes the argument for rehabilitation. Jacques Auidard's incredible film follows 19-year-old Arab prisoner Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) as he learns - quite well - the rules of the game. Incarcerated for assault after a childhood in the system, Malik is friendless, illiterate, and virtually defenseless (on his first day in the slammer, he's beat up for his shoes). But one of the things that initially makes him an outcast - his race - soon turns into something of an unfortunate opportunity, as the leader of the Corsican mafia comes to Malik to murder of another Arab inmate. With this crash course in prison politics under his belt, Malik proves a shockingly apt pupil.

I think it was someone over at the A.V. Club who dinged A Prophet for the fact that the French don't have quite the legacy of prison cinema that we have in the States. But I've got to say that any film that's compared to both "Oz" and The Godfather in a positive light obviously doesn't need a "native" tradition to get the details right. Auidard's film is incredibly visceral, a character study as much as a take on both prison psychology and contemporary race relations in France. Malik's story both generalizes the prison experience and roots it in a very particular time and place.

Auidard loves his losers, but neither Paul in Read My Lips nor Thomas in The Beat That My Heart Skipped get their hooks in you quite so much as Malik does - partly because unlike Paul and Thomas, we get to see Malik when he was still (somewhat) innocent. Rahim is a find - at first, it seems as if he'll just be a foil for all of the characters around him (in particular, the terrifying Niels Arestrup as mob boss Cesar), but he slowly builds into something much more complex. This is the delight of Auidard's films - in other hands, they could easily sink into their pulp origins, but he strips them down without rendering them any less juicy.

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