DLR LIBRARY BLOG

Un Prophete

by Jacques Audiard (France,2009)

Set in a contemporary French prison outside Paris, Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete tells the story of nineteen-year old Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim). We meet him in the opening scene, arriving scared and bewildered to begin the first day of a six year sentence. From that point on we are with him throughout this tough,uncompromising two and a half hour film, the camera kept tight to his face. Everything he sees and hears we see and hear too, plunging into the dark, violent world of prison life with him.

Unable to read or write, Malik does not seem at first a hardened criminal. He is completely alone in jail, and initially finds himself beaten in the yard and hit on in the showers.He is then attacked and threatened by a Corsican gang who he learns hold considerable sway,both with their fellow inmates and the prison guards. They force him to do a favour for them, and from then on he begins a fascinating journey, becoming more and more integrated into the gang and slowly developing both as a man and a powerful gangster before our very eyes.

Gang leader Cesar (a brilliant Niels Arestrup,who featured in Audiard's earlier 2005 De Battre Mon Coeur s'est Arreté) takes Malik under his wing, using him for further criminal activities both inside and (during day release later in his incarceration) outside prison. But this is no soft-centred father-son relationship. Cesar is cold-hearted,violent and calculating, and Malik learns that in order to survive he must become so himself.On short trips undertaken for Cesar to Paris and Marseilles, he begins to establish his own,independent criminal contacts and operations, and to make plans for a life of organised crime, post-prison.

The main strenght of the film is the approach it takes to this material. Audiard has said he intended the film as the anti-Scarface, and it is most certainly this and a whole lot more.There is no glamour in this world, no rags to riches aspirational tale disguised as a crime drama. Malik's world is cold and brutal, with the grittiness alleviated but never glossed over by gorgeous, often handheld cinematography and mournful, stirring piano and strings.

Un Prophete exceeds on every level,and is one of the finest films in any genre of the past five years. To say anymore in this review would be to spoil it. It has the unmistakable feel of greatness to it, and serves to remind how thrilling, daring and powerful cinema can be both as art and entertainment.

I borrowed my copy from DLR Libraries, and you really should too.

Steven Callaghan

Steven Callaghan is the author of the Paris set novel Fishing in Beirut. For more information see fishinginbeirut.com