Writer-director Jacques Audiard didn’t take home the Oscar for best foreign language film last Sunday night, but his gangster epic, “A Prophet (Un Prophete),” is a formidable piece of work.
Through the story of one 19-year-old petty criminal, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who is sent to prison for six years, Audiard shows us how an unformed youth becomes a potent force in the underworld through what he learns in jail.
Malik begins as a terrified victim of all sorts of abuse, but after he forms an alliance with the Corsican gangster, Cesar Luciani (played by the awesome Niels Arestrup, above left), everything starts to change for him.
Cesar puts a big quid pro quo in front of Malik — in order to receive the gangster’s protection, the younger man will have to kill one of Cesar’s enemies.
Audiard takes us through Malik’s education step-by-step; acting newcomer Tahar Rahim makes us believe we are seeing a major league criminal manufactured right in front of us.
The movie doesn’t appear to have a political agenda, but it is a very powerful critique of prisons as a dumping ground for criminals of different backgrounds. If Malik was kept among his own kind — young first-time offenders — we would not see a prodigious crime lord-in-the-making in the closing scene.
The director’s dazzling mix of realism and fantasy elements keeps “A Prophet” from being the unwatchable horror story it could have been. Scenes in which a dead man returns to haunt Malik and moments of oddly primitive camerawork take the film way out of the realm of docudrama.
In the movie’s strongest setpiece, Malik is given a contract hit to pull off in Paris while he is on a work release program. Through amazingly deft editing and sound design, we are put into the head of the young criminal at what is probably the key moment in his “education” — there’s no going back from this point on.
Like last year’s Italian crime epic, “Gomorra,” this film acts as a corrective to Hollywood treatments of the same material – where, all too often, violence is used to excite the audience and the “gangster” lifestyle is glamorized.
(“A Prophet” opens today at the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk and the Criterion in New Haven.)
