Last year’s cinematic crop must be breathing a sigh of relief. Had Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet come out last year, it would have been heads and shoulders above the rest.
A nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and sweeping the César Awards in France, A Prophet is finally making its way to release in St. Louis.
Audiard, an auteur whose small but impressive filmography demonstrates a definite affinity for damaged young men and the criminal underbelly of French society, is at the peak of his craft in A Prophet, his follow-up to 2004’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The film tells the story of Malik—played remarkably well by newcomer Tahar Rahim—a young Arab man who is sent to a French prison for six years and, through his association with a Corsican mafia group within the prison, rises up through the criminal world.
Kevin Maher of The London Times called the film, “as epic as The Godfather,” and it isn’t hard to see why. Though comparing any film to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather—widely considered one of the best films ever made—is a foolhardy task, Audiard’s skill in taking us through Malik’s emotional and psychological journey from petty criminal to mafia kingpin is similar to the journey taken by Michael Corleone’s transformation from civilian life to the head of a criminal family in Coppola’s film.
What’s most impressive, then, is how epic in scope the film feels despite playing out the majority of its action inside prison walls, and it’s to Audiard’s credit that he manages to bring a freshness and intensity to the proceedings. One scene in particular, in which Malik is forced to carry out a violent act by the head of the Corsican gang (played with blinding fervor by Niels Arestrup), is one of the most intense celluloid moments in quite some time.
A lot of credit must also go to Rahim. Putting the weight of a film on the shoulders of a relative newcomer must have been daunting, but Rahim is more than up to the task, handling the character’s progression from scrappy and wide-eyed street kid to smooth career criminal with ease.
Though The Beat That My Heart Skipped might seem eerily similar in subject matter in its depiction of a young French man working in the criminal sphere, the trajectory of Malik in A Prophet couldn’t be more different. Whereas the main character—played by Romain Duris—in the 2004 film is struggling to get out of the underworld, Malik (an illiterate undesirable in French society when he enters prison) finds power and respect as he rises through the mafia.
Audiard is offering a critique of modern French society, questioning why society drives people like Malik to go to such means.
In the end, he seems to be saying that Malik’s trajectory was not created by his stint in the prison system, but by the ineffective society that put him there.
