Un prophète
Jacques Audiard (2009)
It’s gruesome, long and hard to follow. It lacks the tonal variety and the unexpectedness of the two other Audiard films I’ve seen. I think some of the praise it’s getting reflects the fact that its violence is hard to take and that you feel relieved to get through it. But A Prophet is so sure-footed – it has such confident, sustained momentum and such a marvellous central performance – that it’s hard not to admire. Written by Audiard with Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Peufaillit and Abdel Raouf Dafri (who also co-wrote the recent Mesrine pictures), A Prophet is a criminal coming of age story. Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a young French Arab, serving a six-year prison sentence for an unspecified offence. (When the prison authorities ask if his first language is French or Arabic he seems unsure – and he’s more or less illiterate in both. He left school at the age of eleven.) Noticeably solitary, he’s taken under the baleful wing of César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), the elderly leader of a group of Corsicans in the prison. On César’s instructions, Malik murders another Arab called Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) and becomes the Corsicans’ factotum, to the suspicious disgust of most of the other Arab prisoners. Through César – who seems to have most of the prison staff in his pocket and connections in the outside world with lawyers, as well as with organised crime – Malik is allowed, once he’s half-way through his sentence, to go out of the prison on a day’s leave each week. He runs criminal errands and sees people on behalf of César; he resumes his friendship with an ex-prisoner called Ryad (Adel Bencherif), now dying from the cancer which he had thought was in remission. Malik also grows increasingly close to the wife and child whom Ryad asks him to look after when he’s gone. At first Malik observes the prison’s rules on leave (he knows the penalty for failing to do so is solitary confinement): he leaves at seven in the morning and returns by the appointed time of seven pm. One evening he’s late back; after carrying out the murder of a senior Mafioso for César, he’s even later and gets ‘put in the hole’ for forty days and forty nights. Malik emerges from solitary strong enough to reject César and to go over to the Arab side. A Prophet ends with his release from prison. He’s greeted by Ryad’s widow (as I assumed she was by now) and child and they walk, happily, away from the building, with an almost military procession of vehicles following them and ‘Mac the Knife’ on the soundtrack.
There were evidently important elements of A Prophet that I really struggled to understand. I grasped that the Sarkozy government’s decision to repatriate large numbers of Corsican time-servers to prisons off the French mainland weakened the power base of César, who becomes one of the few Corsicans remaining in the prison where the main action takes place. I didn’t follow quite how Malik’s growing criminal nous exploited this situation, or understand the relationships involving the Arabs that he meets with on his day trips from prison – or, in particular, why Ryad works with Malik to kill the Mafioso Jack Marcaggi. Are the drivers in the final motorcade (Arab?) men ready to protect Malik, now that he’s gained respect and prestige (and authority?) in the criminal underworld? I expect it’s faults in my brain rather than in Jacques Audiard’s storytelling that caused me to miss so much – but it’s enough to limit what I can usefully record about A Prophet. The title is, I guess, intentionally ambiguous. There’s a brief exchange of dialogue, in which César talks of Malik’s connection with both himself and, inevitably through his ethnicity, with the Arab prisoners. César refers to him as a ‘prophet’, meaning, I suppose, a representative – in relation to different groups. Malik appears to experience hallucinations, in which the ghost of Reyeb visits him and he has at least one startling moment of clairvoyance – so is he a prophet in a sense of a predictor? Malik also seems to be drawn to the religious community of some of the Arabs on the outside – is the prophet of the title Mohammed rather than or as well as Malik?
One of the bits of blurb advertising A Prophet describes it ‘As epic as The Godfather’. I assume the writer (from The Times) is using the word ‘epic’ (loosely) to denote quality rather than scale. Although the ethnic ramifications of the prison society are absorbing, A Prophet is quite limited in terms of theme and narrative scope. What’s more remarkable about the film is that, in spite of its subject matter, it manages elements of wit. It isn’t humorous in the style of See How They Fall or The Beat That My Heart Skipped but Audiard builds up the horrifying interaction between the criminal worlds within and beyond the prison so calmly and relentlessly that it becomes almost funny – you want to laugh at what Malik gets up to on his day trips before obediently returning to jail on the dot of seven. (I didn’t, though, understand how this day-release procedure worked – what pressure, other than the threat of recapture, kept the prisoners from absconding.) What gives A Prophet breadth, and complements its gruelling realism, are Tahar Rahim as Malik, an intelligent score by Alexandre Desplat, and the film’s quasi-supernatural interludes. The distinctive dream sequences, even if they don’t (to me) have the quality of dreams, are expertly edited (by Audiard’s regular editor Juliette Welfling). When Malik dreams of multiplying numbers of deer, galloping ahead and eerily lit by the headlights of a car in which he seems to be travelling, the sequence culminates in an image of a leaping deer – it prefigures a road sign of a deer, and a car’s collision with one, in real life. Malik’s encounters with the dead Reyeb are insistent too (at least one of these occurs when Malik’s on drugs but not all of them do).
I saw A Prophet at the Richmond Filmhouse but it’s also showing at the Odeon. I’ve seen it advertised at both places and I guess it was the same trailer – but the Odeon version struck me as cynical because it seemed to manage not to mention the potentially offputting fact that this was a foreign language film. The calculation seemed to be that this might keep audiences away but that if people only gave the film a chance they wouldn’t worry about the subtitles because of all the compensating violence. Although I found it sometimes very difficult to watch – especially the scene in which Malik slits Reyeb’s throat with a razor blade – I never felt the violence in A Prophet was excitative. You accept that it’s an intrinsic part of the structures that Audiard is describing and that, if life within these structures is going to be presented realistically, it would be evasive to tone down the ways in which these men maim and kill one another. You certainly never feel the violence involving Malik is gratuitous. His killing of Reyeb does invite comparison with The Godfather: this initiation into homicide is not far off the Michael Corleone class.
Niels Arestrup, who played the hero’s father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, gives a fine performance as César – it’s a compelling portrait of brutal authority in decline and being overtaken by fearful loneliness. Jacques Audiard’s casting as Malik of Tahar Rahim is a stroke of genius. Rahim, who’s of Algerian descent, had little professional experience at the time but Audiard perceived he would not only draw the camera but get the audience on his side – which is what makes his acts of violence upsetting. Rahim’s Malik is always learning – to read and write, to survive in prison, to construct a criminal career. Yet there’s always something innocent about him (his reactions to his first trip in a plane on one of his days out of prison are lovely to watch): that’s why A Prophet is shocking in showing the effects on him of the institution of which he’s part. The way that Malik gets his brain into shape, through education and experience (he learns Corsican), is brilliantly expressed by Rahim in the way that this boy’s face – cloudy and anxious at first, but with foreshadowing hints of watchfulness and thoughtfulness – begins to take shape.
22 January 2010
