Consider me scared straight. There is no way I would ever step foot in prison after watching A Prophet —even a French prison, where you get a baguette with your meal. That’s the one luxury inmates are afforded, and the deeper into the film’s savage world you go, the more you come to appreciate things like, oh, laws and human decency.
Even Malik El Djebena, the teenage delinquent who serves as the film’s hero—or anti-hero, you may decide—seems ready to crack as he finds himself thrown in way over his head. Though you can imagine Djebena is a neighborhood nuisance in the projects, he’s not a murderer. Rather, he's not until the Corsican gang running the jail picks him out for a job. Kill an inmate who’s turned state’s witness, he's told, or you won’t survive here. He tries to squeal to the warden, but two guards wrap a plastic bag over his head, warning him that they’re not screwing around. By the time we see him practice hiding a razor blade in his mouth, his gums bleeding, it’s clear this isn’t your typical Gallic arthouse picture.
Call it a two and a half hour suckerpunch that leaves you winded. Or is that exhilarated? It’s hard to tell, because the film speeds by before you have your bearings, leaving you racing to keep up with El Djebena, who proves to be surprisingly, even dangerously, clever. At times, it’s a challenge to follow all the players, schemes and backstabbings, but that’s part of the fun, too. Director Jacques Audiard has made his movie brutal as a Scorsese gangland picture, cool as Melville’s crime dramas, and even included some trippy, supernatural sequences that are as surreal as anything in David Lynch’s work.
But enough with the lazy comparisons to other directors: Audiard stands on his own. He’s perverted the narrative about a small town boy seeking fame and fortune in the big city. Instead, we watch a kid with nothing to his name but a fifty Euro note fight with his back up against a wall. After committing his first murder—“I can’t kill someone,” he whimpers after the Corsicans give him the job—he finds himself stumbling up the underworld’s Byzantine social ladder, proving hard-edged enough to gain the favor of mob lords, ambitious drug dealers and French Muslim gangs. Soon, he’s making connections on his own and running with the heavy kingpins that once used him as a lapdog.
In A Prophet, the race wars that are a cliché in most prison dramas offer subtle commentary on the role Muslims immigrants play in modern France. Though he works with the Corsicans, in their eyes El Djebena is nothing but a “dirty Arab.” Ironically, the Arab and Muslim inmates consider him a traitor to his brothers. In the end, he doesn’t fit in anywhere—which might be why he works so hard to fit in everywhere. Audiard has stated that in both the film’s title and the character of El Djebena, he’s tried to give French moviegoers a face they haven’t seen on screen before, and he largely succeeds.
There’s so much going on in this movie just in terms of the story, but the direction deserves a big mention. Audiard gives certain scenes their own titles, like the chapters of a novel. Major players get a freeze frame while their name covers the screen. In another sequence, a rap song is laid over an awesome montage of El Djebani running a lucrative contraband racket in the cafeteria. Both reminded me of the gimmicky filmmaking Tarantino is sometimes capable/guilty of, but they definitely work here, and keep the story alive and popping. Some of Audiard’s most creative touches give the story an artsier bent, like a hazy dream sequence where the ghostly images of deer bound away from headlights, or the surreal reappearances of Djebena’s first murder victim, who haunts him during periods of stress.
