A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)

A Prophet (Un prophète)

***

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is far too long, sometimes a bit confusing, and in the end predictable and formulaic. Worse than that, despite also sweeping the César awards, it doesn't rise to the same dizzying heights of emotion, whiz-bang storytelling and the challenging spiritual ambiguities of Audiard's previous film, the glorious The Beat That My Heart Skipped.



And yet. A Prophet moves willfully towards a destination that perhaps I should have described less as predictable than inevitable; as the moment-by-moment tension grows more tight, the realization slowly dawns that Malik (Tahar Rahim), the prisoner without family or friend, past or people, will ascend to the top of a power hierarchy that extends far beyond the jail in which he is held, by the end almost nominally. A lesson without didacticism, an "issue" film without a whiff of preachiness, and a moral film without "good" or "bad" guys, A Prophet is an at-times spellbinding march through the criminal system in France - not merely the de jure criminal justice system of arrest, trail, imprisonment and parole, but the de facto system of gangs and bribery, networks and hierarchies, drugs and murder. Taking place over years, even shifting demographics tilts playing fields in the claustrophic but never truly insular world inside the prison walls.

 

 None of the characters are sociopaths, none ciphers or cookie-cutters (Audiard loves his supporting cast); but none end up vibrating with the fierce urgency of Romain Duris' Thomas Seyr, something that saps A Prophet of some intensity compared to its predecesor. Nevertheless, a film very much worth seeing, and a film very much worth chewing over, A Prophet will probably linger, slightly unpleasantly, like a bad memory half-forgotten, an aftertaste impossible to quite wash away.

 (Seen at the Landmark Bethesda Row)