Tough talk between Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup in A Prophet
If you have to join them, beat them
By John Esther
Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix and France’s official Oscar submission for Best Film in a Foreign Language film, co-writer and director Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (Un Prophète) finds imprisonment a necessary lifestyle for some, regardless of what they can foresee.
Condemned to six years in prison for assault of a police officer, 19-year-old Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) needs nobody. His crime, posturing and the scars on his back illustrate a life misused and mistrusting of authority. Prison will hardly alleviate such an attitude.
Illiterate, orphaned and alone, part-Corsican and Arab, Malik becomes the perfect assassin for a Corsican mob boss, Cêsar Luciani (a superb Niels Arestrup), when a snitch of Arab descent, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), comes for a 10-day stay before testifying against a mob boss on the outside.
Understandably Reyeb is paranoid of everyone, but when he offers Malik some hash in exchange for head, the Corsican mob boss makes an offer Malik cannot resist.
After he does his first mission well, Malik gains minimal favor with the Corsicans and maximum loathing from the Arabs in the prison. The Arabs do not understand why he would side with the Corsicans while the Corsicans hardly view Malik with racial equality.
Shot by both sides, Malik takes the opportunity of prison and predicament and learns how to read and write. He not only learns how to read books, he learns how to read the thoughts of those around him, knowing what they want to hear, slowly gaining power on the inside and the outside with both Arabs and Corsicans. But this power is not for unification a la Invictus but for the kind of self-preservation a small boy from Corleone, Italy did during the last century.
Running a smooth 149 minutes, A Prophet is a well-made film examining how there are many types of prisons within a prison (or the world) and the power of language to allow one to be a little freer than the next inmate.
