There are movies you admire for their vision, technique, the way they tell the truth about the times we live in. You don’t necessarily love them, but they make great subjects for dinnertime discussion or movie reviews. Many arthouse films belong in this category.
There are movies you love, for reasons you can’t really go into, because love is like that. These are the movies you refer to during personal crises, when you’re trying to make sense of what’s happening. You can see the flaws of these movies but you love them anyway, probably because they are flawed.
(Of course there are movies you hate for some reason, or none, and these are still preferable to the movies that make no impression on you whatsoever. Trust me, loathing is better than nothing.)
Then there are the movies you admire and love, and this is a small category. You feel compelled to make your friends see them. You need to defend them from nitpickers. In extreme cases you start collaring random strangers and yelling, “You have to see this movie!”
In my case one of those movies is a French crime drama called The Beat That My Heart Skipped. It was directed by Jacques Audiard, whom I’d never heard of. In April I saw Audiard’s latest movie, A Prophet.
Since then I’ve seen it five times.
So this is me collaring you and dragging you to see A Proph-et. Clearly, this is not a proper movie review.
A Prophet is the story of Malik El Djebena, a 19-year-old French Algerian orphan sentenced to six years in jail for assaulting a cop.
The film opens on his first day in prison: he has the look of someone who expects to be struck at any second. He’s illiterate, he has no friends in or out of prison, he’s pretty; we think, “The boy is dead meat.” Happily, we are wrong.
Propelled by an amazing performance by Tahar Rahim, steered with great assurance by Jacques Audiard, infused with the cockiness and pure cinematic joy of the early Scorsese, A Prophet is a film that constantly surprises.
We are prepared to pity Malik, and he seems doomed to be a victim.
When he ventures out into the yard, he is divested of his sneakers and beaten. Reyeb, a recently-arrived prisoner, offers him hash for sex, then the Corsican mafia inside the jail makes him an offer he can’t refuse: Kill Reyeb, or we’ll kill you. In a squirm-inducing scene, Malik practices hiding the murder weapon — a razor blade — in his cheek; before long the sink is streaked with blood.
Oddly enough Reyeb turns out to be the best friend he’s ever had. In their brief conversation Reyeb tells him he can learn to read in prison. “The point is to leave here smarter than when you came in,” he says.
Think of the killing as an inverted version of Meursault shooting an Arab in Camus’ The Stranger: Malik has no choice, and he loves his life, such as it is, much more than Meursault did. Malik is placed under the protection of the Corsican boss Cesar Luciani; he runs errands and makes the coffee, enduring the Corsicans’ taunts of “dirty Arab.” The Muslims in the prison regard him as the Corsicans’ dog; he doesn’t belong anywhere.
It’s around this time that our little would-be victim reveals that he has teeth — a sharp intelligence, a capacity to spot and play the angles. While the Corsicans are pushing him around, he’s learning their language. When the Sarkozy policy repatriating political prisoners takes effect, Luciani finds himself almost alone and Malik becomes his right hand. As in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the central relationship is between a young man and his brutal father figure; in both movies the “father” is played with lordly menace by Niels Arestrup. What begins as a powerless young man’s fight for survival becomes a struggle to rule.
udiard has made a prison movie about free-dom — not the loss, but the finding of it. Malik, tabula rasa (a blank slate), a man with no family, possessions, or history, is the freest man in prison. There is literally nothing to hold him back. He takes his freedom and uses it as a weapon. While he’s sweeping floors and doing chores for Luciani, he’s building his own business network. He slowly gains the acceptance of the Muslim community in prison; he even acquires a family outside the walls. His friendship with Ryad, the former inmate who taught him to read, and with Ryad’s wife and son, gives him the emotional security he never had.
When Luciani arranges for him to take 12-hour leaves, he discovers that the outside world operates on the same principles as prison. Prison turns out to be great training for CEOs, with courses in smuggling, dealing and murder. The first time Malik takes an airplane, he goes through an airport security check. As the guard runs the metal detector under his outstretched arms, Malik opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue the way he would in a prison inspection.
It’s hilarious and lovely.
But Malik is a murderer, smuggler, drug dealer, criminal, bad man, you may say. Under the circumstances, how could he be anything else? He is in his context.
A Prophet contains set pieces so exciting they lift you off your seat — during one particularly doomed assignment, Malik demonstrates that he has the biggest cojones in Paris. But there’s more: this is a gangster thriller with a transcendental streak. The nitty-gritty of “real” time seamlessly coexists with Malik’s own dream time. In his mind, Reyeb is still around and they have conversations. “That’s disgusting,” Malik complains when Reyeb blows cigarette smoke out of the gash in his throat.
Malik has dreams that may be construed as visions. “What are you, a prophet?” a gang lord asks. Maybe he is. Sitting in solitary confinement, staring up at the ceiling, our boy Malik smiles. He’s looking at the future, and he created it.