Movie Review: A Prophet

Brilliant - Tahar Rahim. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 5/5
Verdict: A jailhouse masterpiece.

Trailing a list of awards - including Cannes' runner-up Grand Prix and virtually every prize at the French Oscar-equivalents, the Cesars - the new film by the austere, coolly brilliant French director Jacques Audiard yields its secrets only slowly.

That's because the central character, Malik (Rahim), is in the process of discovering, indeed of becoming, who he is. A 19-year-old North African Arab, he arrives in prison as a blank slate: asked if he eats pork, he says he doesn't really know.

Beginning a six-year sentence for assaulting a cop, he's not the curdled, alienated youth of jailhouse cliche; he's shy, even polite - he calls the screws "boss" - and we fear we're watching a lamb led to the slaughter.

But almost at once, he is taken under the wing of the Corsican mafia that rules the place. Their quick-thinking leader, Cesar Luciani (the chillingly reptilian Arestrup in a standout performance), has his own reasons for wanting the newcomer on side, but the others don't much like this "dirty Arab" in their midst and the men in the opposing Muslim power bloc don't trust Malik either.

When Luciani offers Malik a starkly simple choice between proving his allegiance or dying, we can feel the gangster's grip close tightly around him.

What unfolds over the next two hours is a gripping, deeply naturalistic drama that defies easy classification. There's none of the quasi-documentary rhetorical flourish and sadness of, say, the brilliant Gomorrah. Rather the film exploits the conventions of the genre while simultaneously both subverting and sublimating them.

Some critics have read it as social commentary or even an allegory of France's relationship with Algeria. But it's best digested as a gritty jail picture of compelling self-assurance with an almost Dickensian richness to the characters. And the rich cinematography and deft camerawork play so well with a palette of blues and greys that it's sometimes hard to believe it is shot in colour.

As in his earlier The Beat My Heart Skipped, about a gangster discovering music, Audiard is exploring both human frailty and the nature of the criminal personality.

But that is not to say he romanticises or sentimentalises his subject.

Malik, who begins the film as an illiterate loser, has a potential that derives not from virtue, but from cunning. He morphs from gofer to enforcer because he's a fast learner who perfectly embodies the Darwinian urges that drive us all. It's not an easy watch, by any means, but it is to jail films what the Godfather series was to mafia pictures.

It sets a new standard.

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi
Director: Jacques Audiard
Running time: 149 mins
Rating: R18 (violence, offensive language, drug use, sex scenes) In French, Arabic and Corsican with English subtitles

Peter Calder interviews the director, Jacques Audiard, here.