Winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and Oscar nominated for Foreign Language Film (where the also-rans are usually better films than the winners), UN PROPHETE is an electrifying film about a weak young man who rises through the ranks of the mafia underworld into a person of strength to be feared. It is probably one of the best mafia films a gangster movie-loving viewer could ever see, and I fear it won't get its due because the film is French: foreign and subtitled.
I say this because, in the film classes I teach, there is still a definite aversion to foreign language films, not to mention a provincial scope when it comes to a teenager's definition of "quality." The good news is that when you ask a teenager what the greatest gangster film of all time is, you typically hear either "The Godfather" or, even more frequently, "Goodfellas." The bad news is you are also more likely to hear "Boondock Saints," "Scarface" (DePalma's remake) or "American Gangster." Few teens have even heard of "Donnie Brasco."
What I'd bet almost none of my students could do is identify the fact that three amazing gangster films - I'd say three of the best of all-time - were released in this past decade. They make up, according to Brad Bevert of RopeOfSilicon.com, a sort of de facto modern mafia trilogy. They are all as action-packed, gripping and, yes, violent as any crime thriller could hope to be and any teen viewer could hope to encounter. So why are they under the radar? You guessed it; they're foreign.
I'm speaking, of course, of Fernando Meirelles' "Cidade de Deus (City of God)," a Rio-based film from 2002, Italy's "Gomorra (Gomorrah)" from 2008 as directed by Matteo Garrone, and now last year's A PROPHET, directed by Jacques Audiard. So loved is "City of God" in particular that, at last check, it stood at #17 on the all-time list at IMDB. I ranked that film in my top 5 of the past decade. And, from an educational standpoint, this "trilogy" of young men involved in drug trades and the treachery of crime gives us one film in Spanish, one in Italian, and one in French. The romantic languages are covered!
Needless to say, I'm cheerleading for recognition for these three films and will be pushing them to my students. But I should take a few minutes to talk about A PROPHET specifically...
When we first meet Malik, a scrappy-but-handsome 19 year-old, he is entering prison. We don't know what for, and though Malik answers a brief battery of personal questions amidst his strip-search and entry paperwork for incarceration, we learn precious little about who he is or why he's there. About the most Malik tells us is that he's innocent, but they might as well print that on the uniforms; everyone says that.
Not long thereafter, however, we get a key piece of information thanks to the social pecking order of the French prison; Malik is Arab, or "a dirty Arab," as he's referred to by the prisoners at the head of the institution's internal power structure, a Corsican gang led by Cesar Luciani, who is not going to allow Malik to peacefully serve his six year sentence and be quietly released. Instead, Cesar, a sadistic, prison-bound don, enlists the Muslim boy, convincing him that only under his wing will the boy even survive his sentence. But as all Arabs are unworthy of trust in the eyes of the Corsicans, Malik must prove his allegiance by killing a fellow Arab prisoner hated by Luciani.
Though we never learn what put Malik in prison in the first place, we learn quickly that he's not there for murder. In fact, it's clear that he's never killed before. But he learns that truly has no choice. I have read other critics' reviews of this murder scene and feel that they've said too much, so all I will say here is that this baptism-by-blood for Malik is one of the most harrowing scenes in any film from 2009. It is uncertain, risky, messy, and in danger of being unsuccessful. And I'd put money on the fact that anyone who sits through it will be hooked for the rest of the film.
Director Audiard does better than simply telling a compelling crime story with A PROPHET. The man Malik kills becomes a ghost in his life, an other-worldly cellmate who offers advice to Malik and exhales cigarette smoke through the slit in his neck that Malik provided him with. Malik then seems to begin to hallucinate on occasion, the film's tie-in to its title. It's not an in-your-face style like Tarantino, but it's stylish and exciting in its own right.
Niels Arestrup is chilling as Cesar, a much less even-tempered Don Corleone. And newcomer Tahar Rahim is sneakily magnetic as Malik. It could be the breakthrough debut of the year; you can't take your eyes off of him. As Malik's good behavior allows him the privilege of day-long furloughs, Cesar co-opts them as his own, forcing Malik to travel great distances within France and complete dangerous outside assignments for him. It's during these adventures that Rahim allows Malik to slowly develop a bit of a swagger, leading up to a cold-blooded final encounter between Malik and Cesar that is anything but a typical show-down. Cesar has used Malik, but by the film's end, it's clear that Malik got something out of it himself: a purpose and a confidence. It is not until the final moments of the film that Malik would even find himself in a position to decide that he doesn't need Cesar anymore.
UN PROPHETE has a great subplot, too, concerning a friend Malik meets in prison who is battling cancer and, after straightening himself out upon release and starting a family, is sucked back in to a life of crime at the request of Malik, who has no one else to turn to in his efforts to complete the ridiculous tasks Cesar demands of him.
Don't call yourself a fan of gangster/mafia/crime movies and turn your nose up to A PROPHET. It is a gripping film with a fantastic script, quality acting and stylish direction. It's proof that the mafia genre gave us more this past decade than Scorese's "The Departed." It's one of the best crime thrillers in recent memory, and one of the finest films of the past year.
4.0 out of 4
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