A Prophet (2010)

Jacques Audiard, director of the Oscar-nominated French film, A Prophet, calls his movie the “anti-Scarface.” And while this tale of an outsider turned crime boss bears a striking resemblance to that older one, he may be right.

The film centers on Malik El Djebenna (Taher Rahim), a French-born Arab and non-practicing Muslim. When he enters a French prison to serve his six years for petty assault, he’s 19 years old and illiterate. It’s his first stint in the big house, where he has no friends or connections. Having grown up in juvenile homes, he has no one on the outside, either.

On his second day in the exercise yard, Malik is approached by a Corsican mob boss named Cesar Luciani (Niles Arestrup). Another Arab prisoner–this one a snitch awaiting his testimony against Cesar’s crime syndicate–is being temporarily housed in the main cell block. Non-affiliated loner Malik, whom the target mistakes for gay like himself, is the Corsican’s only chance to get rid of his enemy. So he makes the newcomer an offer he can’t refuse.

It is in these earliest moments that A Prophet starts to set itself apart from Brian De Palma’s mob classic. Malik is no Tony Montana. He doesn’t revel in any new-found sense of belonging or power. As he practices hiding and producing a razor blade from the roof of his mouth, blood drips from his cheeks and tongue, and anguish reads on his face. There is no romance in murder for Malik. This is underscored by Audiard’s tight-cropped and shaky camera work during the murder. The scene is as clumsy and claustrophobic as our hero feels committing it.

The completion of the crime further cements Malik’s loner status. The Corsicans, who for a time rule the yard and even control the prison guards, view him as their lowly Arab lapdog and slave. The other Muslims see him as a dirty Corsican. His only friend is the ghost of the man that he killed.

It is fitting since Malik is also a ghost of sorts. No one truly sees the skinny kid with the pencil-thin mustache. But the observant boy turns this to his advantage, learning to read and write, teaching himself Corsican (his third language, along with French and Arabic), and acting as the unassuming go-between of the prison’s various ethnic and criminal factions. Along the way, he builds a crime syndicate of his own running drugs with an Arab named Ryad (Adel Bencherif) and a gypsy named Jordi (Reda Kateb), the closest he gets to having living friends. And, as the Corsicans lose control of the prison, they come to need Malik more than their pride will have them admit.

The screenplay, as written by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, sets a markedly different tone than Oliver Stone’s. Unlike Tony Montana, Malik doesn’t lose himself in his criminal persona. It is through the process of doing what he must to survive–and being rewarded by televisions, porn, and Coca Cola–that he discovers who he is. Likewise, for every beautifully shot, operatic scene of violence offered up by Scarface, A Prophet gives us one that’s almost too realistic, resulting in cringes and shocked moans from the audience (and for this reviewer, a few moments of looking up at the ceiling).

Of course, A Prophet is still French, which means that there are a requisite number of surrealistic scenes that take us out of the gritty realism of Malik’s world. One, in which he dreams of frolicking deer who later show up in real-life, lends Malik the prescient quality that gives the film its name.

Rahim, who bears a striking resemblance to Erica Bana in Munich, does a fantastic job of grounding the title role. He’s small but not wimpy; his portrayal is clever but not virtuoso. It is the perfect balance to tell a story like this. As his opposite, Arestrup is remarkable at shrinking from the outside Big Man on Campus to an outnumbered relic without ever once losing his air of terrifying control.

One unfortunate thing (other than a permanent mark on the main character’s face) A Prophet does have in common with its American counterpart is its ponderous length. The subtitles make the film’s long-ish 149-minute runtime seem a full hour longer. But accompanying this young man over the six years that he learns to operate on his own terms, even criminal ones, is a sentence worth serving.