A Prophet – A Review

A Prophet arrived in UK cinemas last week buoyed by the kind of critical and commercial success for which most film-makers would give their eye teeth. Jacques Audiard’s stark prison drama not only picked up awards at the Cannes and London Film Festivals, but has also been a surprise hit in France, with more than a million tickets sold to date.

The film tells the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim), a small-time criminal sentenced to a term of six years inside a tough French prison. Within days of starting his sentence, the young, vulnerable prisoner has been recruited by ageing Corsican mobster César (Niels Arestrup) to kill a fellow prisoner who has been lined up as a prosecution witness in an organised crime case. Whatever doubts Malik has about taking on this task are soon beaten out of him by the Corsican inmates and the prison warders who they control. He has a simple choice to make: kill or be killed. 

The murder, which happens early and brutally in the film, sets Malik on the path to becoming a full-time career crook. In prison he learns how to read and write, but also how to run a series of successful criminal enterprises both within and outside the walls of the jail. Rejected by his fellow Arabs, for whom he has already become too close to the Corsicans, Malik increasingly finds himself under the wing of César and his gang, who treat him with a mixture of affection and contempt. As their ‘little Arab’ he makes coffee and runs errands for them, all the while watching and learning the ropes like a dutiful protégé.

When Malik gets the chance to go outside the prison on day-leave he becomes truly useful to César, who himself has little prospect of release.  As the ‘errands’ he runs become more dangerous, the rewards become greater, and Malik insists to anyone who will listen that, like a budding entrepreneur, he’s ‘working for himself’. All the while though, his progress is being watched by the gradually-weakening mobster, for whom the young man is both a surrogate son and a threat. Also watching over him is the surprisingly benevolent ghost of the man he killed, who visits him for almost fraternal night-time chats in his cell.

A Prophet captures well the frustrations and harsh realities of life in prison today. Malik’s journey from small-time hoodlum to medium-level criminal is shown as not only an inevitable move but also as an intelligent one; as the best choice available to a resourceful young man under such circumstances. Even as he mires himself deeper in smuggling and violence, our sympathies seldom waver. What is he doing after all but learning a trade, and trying to better himself?

Niels Arestrup and Tahar Rahim in 'A Prophet'

As Malik rises, César falls, and the young man’s relationship with the increasingly isolated and miscalculating Corsican becomes the real subject matter of the film. We’ve been here before of course, with Audiard’s 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which told a similar story of a strained ‘father-son’ relationship, from which escape for one meant disaster for the other.

There are moments of real, palpitating tension too: the various slicings and koshings and beatings that we see all seem horribly real. And is it during these, at some undetermined point, that we realise, and Malik himself realises, that moment-by-moment he is becoming a new César.

The possibility of redemption, when it arrives (and without giving too much away) is in the rather conventional form of a pretty young woman with a baby. And this is where, I think, for all of its carefully-observed realism and its white-knuckle suspense, A Prophet hits a bit of a brick wall.

Above all, you see, Audiard’s film is a genre movie. It may be a very good genre movie, but it’s one that seems content to stay comfortably within the confines that it has set for itself. However well-crafted its scenes then, it is always reminiscent of other films, of characters and situations that we already know well. The prison whack-job for example, reminded me of nothing more than the 1989 Tom Selleck film An Innocent Man. The corrupt guards, the politics of the prison yard, ‘the hole’: these are all, to a greater or lesser extent, clichés well-worn in dozens of prison movies, from Escape From Alcatraz to The Shawshank Redemption.

A great film would transcend these clichés, or avoid them altogether; A Prophet merely updates them and gives them a new, gritty setting. That’s not to say that it isn’t a good film, or an effective recreation of prison life, just that, in the grand scheme of things, it limits itself somewhat.