A Prophet
One of the nominated films for the most recent Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language film was A Prophet, a French film directed by Jacques Audiard. I admired it but didn't love it, as I left the theater wondering what the point was.The film chronicles the life of a young Frenchmen of Arabic descent, Tahar Rahim. He enters a tough prison, transferred from a juvenile detention center, and quickly finds out how life will be--his shoes are stolen. The prison is stratified into gangs of ethnic distinction, and things are run by a ruthless bunch of Corsicans who have ties to organized crime. Their leader, a wizened elder named Cesar (Niels Arestrup) sees Rahim as a potential recruit, and tells him that he will assassinate an Arabic prisoner who is going to testify in a big case, or he himself will be killed.
Rahim is taught how to handle a razor--with his mouth--and does the deed, and the film then shows us how this green kid learns the ropes and wends his way to power within the prison. The scenes between Rahim and Arestrup are fascinating, as both need but never quite trust each other. There's a lot of different characters that come in and out of the story (many introduced by helpful title graphics) but I was still was a little lost at times. Also, a storyline that has the ghost of the man Rahim killed haunting him is used intermittently and is under-developed, and I'm not sure a supernatural element works in a gritty prison drama.
What I think was missing most from this film was a reason why I was watching. I don't how Audiard feels about Rahim or prisons or anything else. As it is, it's an entertaining genre picture, and falls in line with any number of similar pictures, like White Heat, Brute Force or even Papillon. If it's anything I've learned after seeing a decent prison movie (or even a bad one) is that prison is no place I want to be.
I admired it but didn't love it, as I left the theater wondering what the point was.
ReplyDeleteSpeculating, but perhaps you were expecting a social realist drama and got a crime film? The former has to have a "point" about society but the latter's responsibility is usually entertainment.
From an interview director Audiard made with The Observer:
"Do we root for Michael Corleone in the Godfather films?" asks Audiard. "I think so, even if he is a monster. People have difficulty swallowing the fact that Malik is a survivor – but I think that's because he's an Arab character. They're not used to seeing Arabs come out on top and they don't like it, not in France, anyway. Oh, it's fine for them to cheer for [Jacques] Mesrine," he says, referring to France's most notorious criminal ever, recently embodied by Cassel in a two-part, César-winning film, "because he's played by an actor everyone thinks is cool. But Tahar, they don't know him, he's an Arab and, sad to say, this is still a problem. Good. I hope it pisses them off. That's the point."