Review: A Prophet
Tahar Rahim in A Prophet
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Thursday, 29, Oct 2009 11:30
Showing at the London Film Festival on October 29th (19:30)
On general release on January 15th
By Richard James.
Fresh from its success at the Cannes Film Festival, Jacques Audiard's film has been named the best film at this year's London Film Festival, winning over the jury panel with its ambition and grittiness.
Anjelica Huston described the film as a "masterpiece… of such purity of vision and clarity of purpose to make it an instant classic".
A Prophet sees Malik, a French Arab, sentenced to six years in prison for attacking a policeman. With no-one looking out for him on the outside, and certainly no-one covering his back inside, he faces a daunting stretch behind bars.
Soon singled out as something of a loner, the Corsican gang who effectively run the prison approach him and force him to carry out their dirty work. From the off Malik finds himself answering the calculating and malicious crime boss Cesar Luciani. Soon he's offered protection from the powers that be as he finds himself totally enveloped in the gang world.
As his powerful circle of acquaintances grows, both inside and out, and he carries out more elaborate tasks for Cesar, Malik begins to grow a power base of his own. As his own schemes begin to take off so his influence starts to spread until the inevitable showdown with the Corsicans, who claim to have saved him, plays out.
Despite being two-and-a-half hours long, the action in A Prophet is unrelenting but crucially the film also provides something truly unique in a crime drama – a lead character with real depth. Tahar Rahim's depiction of Malik's passage through the six years inside is filled with the complete spectrum of emotions as he moves from a state of vulnerability to one of total power and ultimate revenge.
Rahim is superb; on screen for almost the entire 150 minutes he carries the film in a brilliantly understated performance. Niels Arestrup is also fantastic as the crime boss Cesar - think Jack Nicholson in The Departed, just a lot more profound, and not so off-the-wall crazy.
Audiard's film is free of any of the old prison drama clichés and instead tells a story of true human feelings and while we still get all the action and the violence, we also get a much deeper and richer tale.