A PROPHET (UN PROPHÈTE)
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Produced by Martine Cassinelli
Written by Thomas Bidegain & Audiard, based on an idea by Abdel Raouf Dafri & an original script by Dafri & Nicolas Peufaillit
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
French, Arabic & Corsu with English subtitles
France/Italy. 149 min. Rated R
With Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci & Slimane Dazi
 

The nomination of A Prophet (Un Prophète) for best foreign-language film should shatter the pristine image of that category as a reserve for conservative, art-house fare. In its first hour, the French prison/crime thriller is so efficiently and urgently told that any country would want to claim it as its own. The film initially follows 19-year-old new inmate Malik (newcomer Tahar Rahim) through a humiliating rite of passage: the strip search; the buzz cut; and, despite his best efforts to keep to himself, the first beating. His past is only vaguely sketched. Whatever his religious beliefs are, he eats pork—his crime, some sort of altercation with the police.

A group of Corsicans make Malik an offer to protect him, but there’s a catch, of course. If Malik doesn’t kill a prisoner of Arab descent (as is Malik), he will be dispatched instead. The number of white convicts has eroded through the years, but they continue to run the prison in cahoots with the white security guards. Fast-paced and brutal, A Prophet is as riveting as Midnight Express, and trippy, too—a ghost preys upon Malik’s guilty conscience, turning his nightmarish experiences into a hallucination. That said, few feature films come close to the viciousness of HBO’s relentlessly bleak series Oz.

Then the story line turns overly complicated as Malik plays one clique against the other: the Italian mob, the Corsicans, and the Muslims, with 600 kilos of hash and kidnappings thrown in. A score card would be helpful since the second half focuses so much on Malik’s machinations. It all becomes a little too much. During a court-approved daylong furlough, he takes his first airplane ride for a not entirely convincing mission in Marseilles. (A friend on the outside has made him a fake ID.) Not to mention that a climactic bloody shoot-out takes place, without any interference from the police, right in front of Hôtel Plaza Athénée in the most heavily secured zone in Paris. This may seem nitpicky, but the script otherwise painstakingly justifies every step Malik takes, from learning how to read and write to picking up the Corsican dialect. It takes a lot of plot to settle a score.

The most refreshing aspect of Malik’s transformation from rube to errand boy to potential top dog is that he always has a goal, steering clear of the cynical Scarface route. He provides a glimmer of hope among the murders and a near-eye gouging. Immediately the viewer will feel protective toward him. Bruised and cut-up, he still looks boyish—and it doesn’t hurt that Rahim resembles Tom Cruise. Although Malik betrays his feelings in his private moments, he arms himself with a poker face when with his fellow prisoners, so much so that Rahim’s star-making performance gives the film a sense of mystery and ambiguity. Kent Turner
February 25, 2010