Holy fucking shit. Can you say movie boner? I went into Jacques Audiard's gangsters-in-prison film with ridiculously high expectations. There was no way this film could live up to them. Somehow, it exceeded them.
With A Prophet, Audiard takes the basic structure of the gangster on the rise genre as typified by De Palma's Scarface (or any of the gangster movies from the thirties, really), and stripped it of most of the outlandish excesses that have bogged these films down in ludicrousiosity (not that I don't love the wonderful over-the-top-ness of these aforementioned movies). Although A Prophet's protagonist Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) makes the journey from petty hood, naif, nobody to prison top-dog and, upon his eventual release, gangland kingpin in the space of a few years, never does the transformation seem far-fetched. Indeed, A Prophet is so well plotted and paced that Malik's rise not only seems natural, but inevitable. Much of this is due to Rahim's remarkably reserved performance. [Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to say that his work brings to mind De Niro's performance in Godfather II, but fuck it, I'll make the comparison anyway.]
When the friendless Arab lands in the pokey for assaulting a cop (although it is never made entirely clear just what he did), he is forced by Cesar (Niels Arestrup), the Corsican mob leader who runs the prison, to kill an Arab informer. [Side note: The tall motherfucker sitting in front of me in the movie theater obscured about a third of the subtitles, so you'll excuse me if I make any occasional errors as regards the plot. {Second side note: Fuck you, tall motherfucker sitting in front of me.}] The reluctant Malik eventually relents after he is threatened with death. As Malik nervously paces his cell and awkwardly prepares for the assassination, we are drawn into his dilemma of having to kill the informer or be killed the Corsicans. It is as much, if not more, about the anticipation as it is about the messy, brutal murder that the inexperienced Malik commits (and this is indeed one of the sloppiest, tensest mob hits I've seen in a movie).
For most of the, if not the entire, duration of the film, Malik is a closed book. Much like Matt Damon's character in the equally brilliant (though polar opposite, tone-wise and subject matter-wise) white-collar crime film The Informant, Malik is an unknowable entity. For Malik, this is a survival mechanism. One of the reasons he is able to rise to the top of the heap is that expectations of him are so low.
Audiard's film truly excels in the little moments (not that it isn't full of tense bursts of violence). Malik's story is that much more believable because Audiard takes the time to indulge in seemingly mundane, shared human experiences. Indeed, how many other crime films would feature a scene of our main character, an inexperienced traveler, gazing in awe out his plane window as he takes his first flight. It is because of such scenes that Audiard is able to keep his film grounded in a reality lacking in most other films of the genre. [Of course, Audiard also indulges in a few notably surreal moments.]
A Prophet is perhaps the best film I've seen to deal with the subject of prison as a school for criminality. Although Malik enters the big house an anonymous, socially maladjusted malcontent, prison gives him the education to succeed as a world class criminal. Audiard does not necessarily judge nor praise this transformation (nor his main character). He merely shows it happening.
[The trailer:]
Dave's Rating:
1 comment:
I love to do watch it as much as possible.
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