Jacques Audiard’s A PROPHET
A PROPHET recently played at my local art house, and as usual here in fly-over Ohio, my husband and I were the only people in the theatre (okay, two of five). Hey, no matter, this movie rocks. Premiering in the U.S. at Sundance in January and internationally last year at Cannes, where it was the darling of the festival, this amazing film continues to open around the world – so who cares about the Oscar it didn’t win for Best Foreign Film? It’s the gangster film you’ve been dreaming of, in that, it both adheres to and also twists the genre. You end up satisfied by the tacit narrative promises (you know, spurting blood, revenge, power structures) but also surprised by the absolutely creative turns it takes in both style and tone.
Tahar Rahim plays Malik El Djebena, a young French Arab man in prison for a narratively ambiguous crime. It’s implicit that Malik’s rootless, parent-less past may make him a candidate for a little family, that is, of the ‘inside’ variety. Immediately yanked into a cut-throat world ruled by the Corsican mob, Malik is forced to murder a fellow Arab, then spends the rest of the film regretting it, rising through the ranks and then double crossing his superiors for the benefit of his own maturation.
The best part, other than the fact that character is almost always revealed through either subtle performance or behavior, never though explicit dialogue (Malik barely says anything through the whole movie), is the fact that the film engages with a sort of unique brand of fantasy. These sequences, sometimes referencing the future-seeing skill of the film’s title, never stray from the established camerawork, integrating seamlessly. They sneak up on you – but then hit hard with their simple beauty. It’s a path to Malik’s interior life that complements his nuanced, quiet performance. Does it sound like I’m talking about a gangster movie? Exactly the point.
Trailer here:
– AH
