In the heaps of praise given to it by critics, many have compared A Prophet to The Godfather, and it’s easy to see why. Both regale us with the tale of a young man whose rise to criminal domination is as forced by circumstance as it is naturally gifted. Instead of the suffocating family bond that traps Michael Corleone—simplified in Part III with the “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” quote—A Prophet’s Malik, played by Tahar Rahim in a leading debut, is ushered onto this bloody path by the unforgiving prison system, where the teen roughhouser is coerced into being a hitman, and later lackey, to the ruling Corsican mob.
Malik is closer to a different Al Pacino gangster, Tony Montana, not because the film is as brazenly violent and over-the-top as Oliver Stone’s Scarface, but because it’s the story of a stunted minority cultivating power in a society that looks down on his kind. Director Jacques Audiard has stated that he wishes for the film to give the French Arab community someone to look up to, and indeed it has, for better or worse (more worse than not, to be honest).
This is probably why, despite his obviously immoral conduct, Malik’s story isn’t a whirlwind cautionary tale like Tony Montana’s. Whereas Scarface continued past the point where Tony peaked to show his downfall, A Prophet is something more tragic; about an obviously intelligent, diligent and ambitious young man whose only opportunity to spread his wings is by manipulating himself into a position of power in the criminal underworld.
The film takes a slow, deliberate pace to illustrate the drastic life change. Whereas The Godfather’s running time squeezes in an intricate family legacy and plenty of political maneuvers, A Prophet is fairly straightforward in Malik’s conversion and doesn’t necessarily have a lot to tell, plot wise. Outside of its slick camerawork and quirky attention to detail, A Prophet is largely an uninteresting prison movie, too careful to step outside the usual beats of jailhouse bullying—its most surreal elements, like Malik's dream prophecy and ghostly manifestation of guilt, are treated as a casual storytelling style rather than things that actually affect the character.
Between the same old crucial moments, though, the film patiently shows Malik’s learning curve. There are many mundane scenes of Malik serving the Corsicans coffee, just to make it believable that he’s starting to teach himself their language by listening. When he’s instructed to whack a snitch using a razor, we watch his many failed tries in concealing a razor in his mouth, cutting it up badly, as well as his attempts to avoid doing it—almost as if the murder is what the film is building up to, rather than just the beginning of the journey. What this creates is a sense of admiration and sympathy for him, knowing just how difficult it is to commit to becoming a criminal, rather than the dive-in mentality of so many average-joes-gone-bad stories.
Malik’s dead-end fate is further stressed by the ambiguity of his incarceration. The film opens with him already in lock-up, the worldview of the story limited only to his time in jail (which is nicely telegraphed by the opening shot of his handcuffed wrists, tunneled like a Looney Tunes ending that claustrophobically announces his destiny). When a correctional officer makes a crack about him assaulting police officers, Malik briefly protests that he didn’t do such a thing, before getting cut off. The film never visits this point again, but given how the guards are portrayed as corrupt, it’s fair to assume that maybe Malik was a victim of police discrimination, further supporting the case for his life as a criminal being a product of second-class citizenship.
At the same time, A Prophet also criticizes the prison system for doing the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do: it births hardened criminals rather than rehabilitate them. This is very succinctly shown in a sequence where in one of his 24-hour permitted leaves, Malik flies on a plane for the first time and behaves, at the airport and on the plane, as a prisoner would. He's made something of himself, but a thug's life has been imprinted on him forever.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The primary feature is a commentary track with Audiard and Rahim, in French, of course, though that’s no problem because English subs are provided. In addition, there are some deleted scenes, rehearsal footage and Tahar Rahim's screen tests, which are not so much interesting as it is going to be a novel item should he become a huge star after this, which is not entirely out of the question.
"A Prophet" is on sale August 3, 2010 and is rated R. Crime, Drama. Directed by Jacques Audiard. Written by Thomas Bidegain & Jacques Audiard. Starring Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup.
