A Prophet (Jaques Audiard, 2009)

There's much to admire in Jacques Audiard's 2009 film A Prophet. Cinematography and performances are by turns – and sometimes simultaneously – bleak and engrossing. Tahar Rahim gives a fine performance as Malik El Djebena, a young Algerian – illiterate but bilingual in French and Arabic – who has been sent to prison (justly or not, we do not know) for assaulting the police. (It was only mildly distracting that Rahim sometimes resembles a young Keanu Reeves.) Djebena is brutally drawn into the orbit of the Corsican mob that has the run of the prison. These early sequences are the most compelling in the film, convincingly depicting the fear and claustrophobic desperation that permit the Corsicans' boss, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) to get his claws into Djebena by forcing him to murder one of the Muslim inmates. But after this the film gradually becomes less than the sum of its parts. Some quasi-magic realist elements (the ghost of the man Djebena murders; a vision of fleeing deer that later saves his life) are insufficiently integrated, and plausibility begins to diminish: Djebena somehow teaches himself fluent Corsican and convinces the authorities that he is a model prisoner (in order to be let out on day release), all the while getting involved in increasing numbers of different strands of mob and drug-related activity. As the film builds to its denouement, being a Muslim gangster is somehow coded as more admirable than being a Corsican one. Certainly, the absence of punitive moralism is to be applauded, but when Djebena finally punishes Luciani and – in the final scene – emerges from prison to be met by a readymade future partner and child (the child's father, his friend and colleague, having conveniently died of cancer just before), walking triumphantly towards the camera with his new criminal entourage in tow, much of what was distinctive has evaporated and we're left with a much more conventional story of the making of a gangster than the film's beginning leads us to expect. It's a little like Abel Ferrara's King of New York in reverse. Perhaps the way down is just more interesting than the way up.