Director: Jacques Audiard

Screenplay: Jacques Audiard

Running time: 2 hr 31 mins

Genre: Drama/Crime/Thriller

CRITIQUE:

There is one common denominator in the contemporary European cinema, and that is the gritty, socio-realist aesthetic. Take away the hard-edged brutality of Gomorrah and the stripped-down, handheld look of Entre Les Murs, and you take away these films’ ethos – which is to portray social reality with its complex moralities in the rawest of cinematic art. The trend continues with Jacques Audiard’s recent addition to the European movement, the abrasive yet uncompromisingly engrossing A Prophet, which won the Gran Prix for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On one hand, it’s a prison drama with a central protagonist learning prison life the hardest of ways, and on another, a crime film that explores the politics of the mafia ruling class within the prison walls and the organised crimes that perturb the outside world. At the mention of prison drama and mafia movie, classics like The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather come to mind, but Audiard very quickly disposes the clichés – 19-year old Arab Malik enters jail for unexplained reasons and the prison’s corrupt feudal system is laid barely straight away. It is ruled by Luciani, an old don with an erratic temper, the boss of Corsican thugs that holds an iron grip amongst the entire inmate populace, and even surreptitiously conniving with crooked guards. Malik is suddenly cornered and is faced with a terrible choice: play their game and survive, or defy and die.

A Prophet is at its best when it depicts the prison environs like a chess game. There are two black-and-white pieces that stand on both sides on the ground: the Corsicans and the Arabs, both foreigners on the French terrain. Malik is a pawn being pushed around to commit horrific deeds, such as killing a helpless enemy. But he soon learns the shady movements of his king, plays his game as he works his way to the top of the hierarchy – educating himself on the process. He enters prison naive, illiterate and wide-eyed, and later comes out world-wise, and perhaps sensible. All this without an iota of cheapo sentimentality induced.

But its main flaws lie in its utterly labyrinthine narrative, where the film has to rely on cinematic name tags to introduce characters, who have either all-too-abrupt appearances or has little to do with the vast network of players. Where it is strong in its authentic prison realities, its ambitious crime-film scale has a whiff between the blend of Scorcese and Meirelles, losing the translation of Malik’s real moral journey into self-redemption. These flaws are then easily overshadowed by Audiard’s relentless, often cynical, direction, letting the film rescue itself on the final act – where the power struggle is finally put to rest, the kingpin checkmated and Malik emerging out of prison an entirely different man.

VERDICT:

RATING: A-