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A Prophet (Film)
Rating: MA
Running Time: 155
Country: France
Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Tahar Rahim
Distributor: Sony
Film Worth: $14.50
Release Date: February 11, 2010
A riveting and unforgettable story of one man’s rise through the prison ranks.
One of the most popular and acclaimed French for some time, A Prophet is certainly an original film, and has justly been chosen as France's entrant in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year's Oscars.
Director Jacques Audiard has been part of the French film industry for years, but a relatively late entry to directing allowed him to produce two interesting films recently, the haunting The Beat My Heart Skipped and the enticing Read My Lips. This is another departure again; it's a massive, sprawling ultra-realistic prison drama which, over a magisterial two-and-a-half hours, confines us into the most claustrophobic conditions.
Malik (certain star-to-be Tahar Rahim) is a young chancer from a French Arabic background who inhabits one of the urban ghettos on the edge of so many French cities. He gets involved in crime, but his initial attempts land him in prison where, true to legend, his real education begins. He is a good looking rookie, and is therefore prey to any of the old lags who fancy him. He fights to keep them at bay, but pretty soon Malik reluctantly accepts the patronage of the Corsican head of the jail, Cesar (a wonderfully gritty performance from Niels Arestrup). The Corsicans are the most hardened and desperate group, and they run on fierce, enforced loyalty as well as blood ties. Against this effective mafia, the growing population of Arab criminals has to give way. Malik does the maths, adopts a prison style Islam, and captures the even bigger Arabic population and therefore triumphs.
It's a conventional enough story, but Audiard invests it with a kind of metaphysical dimension. In tone and style, it is a little reminiscent of the fine recent Italian mafia film Gomorrah and, like that film, will be talked about for many years to come.