A Prophet is a 2009 French prison melodrama, directed by Jacques Audiard from a screenplay he co-wrote with three others and starring Tahar Rahim in the title role of a convicted Algerian immigrant.
Saturday 29 December 2012
Thursday 27 December 2012
Prophet movie cast and crew
Directed byJacques Audiard
Tahar Rahim
Niels Arestrup
Adel Bencherif
Reda Kateb
Hichem Yacoubi
Jean-Philippe Ricci
Gilles Cohen
Pierre Leccia
Antoine Basler
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Prophet movie overview
A Prophet has been compared to films such as The Godfather and Scarface. The comparison to The Godfather is decent thematically, although it is a bit premature to declare a film on par with a classic that has survived the test of nearly 40 years. The Scarface comparison, though, is almost an insult. As a fan of Brian De Palma's 1983 story of a Cuban refugee turned Miami drug czar, I feel confident in saying it's mere popcorn fodder in comparison to Jacques Audiard's A Prophet. Leave Scarface to the thugs that make up Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah and reserve A Prophet for people who enjoy watching Gomorrah or City of God. As I mentioned when I named it the best film of 2009, watch A Prophet as the third film in a triple-feature with those two and your cup will runneth over with quality.
I was a virgin to Audiard's work before settling in to watch A Prophet months after it won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and as the film played on I was kicking myself for not being more familiar with his work up to this point. His ability to deliver an intense French gangster thriller all while maintaining an importance of human self worth was exhilarating. At the center of the story is 19-year-old Malik El Djebena played with uninhibited precision by Tahar Rahim in a feature film-starring debut that ranks among the best in the business.
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Malik is a French native of Arab descent facing a six-year prison term. How he got there isn't important but who he truly is means everything as he's about to step into an environment controlled by a Corsican gang with a select group of guards in their pocket. Who Malik is, is a Frenchman that speaks both French and Arabic and yet doesn't know how to read or write. Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) realizes Malik's "face" value almost immediately and wants to use him to kill a new inmate of similar ethnicity, and with the mere proposition his life is on the line. It's kill or be killed and there's nothing he can do to stop it. Carrying out the request will secure him six years of prison protection, but at the same time he'll be heading down a path that makes his criminal career to this point look like paint-by-numbers.
All of A Prophet falls on Rahim's shoulders and he carries it as if he's been doing it for years. What's going on behind his eyes is a mystery, but you can't help but watch their every movement for even the slightest clue as to how he is perceiving each scene as it unfolds. There is a stuttering and stammering to his speech when confronted with difficult situations, but then there are other moments when his life, or the lives of others, is on the line and he reacts with the utmost of confidence. This film could have easily been titled An Education had it not already been taken, because that's exactly what Malik is getting.
Equally magnificent is Niels Arestrup, a man I was also unfamiliar with before seeing this film despite having seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Since seeing A Prophet I watched Audiard's previous feature, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which also starred Arestrup only to realize the now 61-year-old actor is a talent I need to acquaint myself with further. Arestrup brings a certain level of venom to Cesar as the weary king of his surroundings. Comparatively Malik is simply a pawn to be done with as Cesar pleases, but his arrogance will soon get the better of him. These two actors share the majority of the film's 155 minute running time and no matter their status, as with chess, the king and the pawn are put away in the same box.
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Utilizing French, Arabic and Corsican you'll be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn't require subtitles to watch this film, but this is something that also goes to the heart of the story and how we so often associate with that which is familiar and judge those who are different. It's those of us that are able to rise above our differences and embrace them who come out on top. Perhaps what's even more fascinating is that Audiard has used a prison-based gangster drama to get that point across, but to that point, where else could be better?
A Prophet is an art film as much as it is a genre film, and I would never paint it in one corner or the other. Audiard's use of sound, occasional handicapping of the camera lens and his ability to work with Rahim to create a character that is not the stereotypically gun-wielding gangster and instead a boy on the path to becoming a man who simply took a road less traveled is to be commended. Malik has difficulty realizing his goals, step one is to stay alive and step two is something he'll deal with when he's confronted with it. The choice he makes, for better or worse, will define the outcome of his life.
He talks a tough game. He works for no one but himself. His innocence could get him killed just as well as it could earn favor with even the hardest of gangsters. Only in the final moments do we really get a sense Malik knows what he wants from this world. Throughout the story much of what comes to him comes without expectation, but once he learns how easy it is to get what you want that's where the story is only beginning and A Prophet is rightly ending.
I was a virgin to Audiard's work before settling in to watch A Prophet months after it won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and as the film played on I was kicking myself for not being more familiar with his work up to this point. His ability to deliver an intense French gangster thriller all while maintaining an importance of human self worth was exhilarating. At the center of the story is 19-year-old Malik El Djebena played with uninhibited precision by Tahar Rahim in a feature film-starring debut that ranks among the best in the business.
.jpg)
Malik is a French native of Arab descent facing a six-year prison term. How he got there isn't important but who he truly is means everything as he's about to step into an environment controlled by a Corsican gang with a select group of guards in their pocket. Who Malik is, is a Frenchman that speaks both French and Arabic and yet doesn't know how to read or write. Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) realizes Malik's "face" value almost immediately and wants to use him to kill a new inmate of similar ethnicity, and with the mere proposition his life is on the line. It's kill or be killed and there's nothing he can do to stop it. Carrying out the request will secure him six years of prison protection, but at the same time he'll be heading down a path that makes his criminal career to this point look like paint-by-numbers.
All of A Prophet falls on Rahim's shoulders and he carries it as if he's been doing it for years. What's going on behind his eyes is a mystery, but you can't help but watch their every movement for even the slightest clue as to how he is perceiving each scene as it unfolds. There is a stuttering and stammering to his speech when confronted with difficult situations, but then there are other moments when his life, or the lives of others, is on the line and he reacts with the utmost of confidence. This film could have easily been titled An Education had it not already been taken, because that's exactly what Malik is getting.
Equally magnificent is Niels Arestrup, a man I was also unfamiliar with before seeing this film despite having seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Since seeing A Prophet I watched Audiard's previous feature, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which also starred Arestrup only to realize the now 61-year-old actor is a talent I need to acquaint myself with further. Arestrup brings a certain level of venom to Cesar as the weary king of his surroundings. Comparatively Malik is simply a pawn to be done with as Cesar pleases, but his arrogance will soon get the better of him. These two actors share the majority of the film's 155 minute running time and no matter their status, as with chess, the king and the pawn are put away in the same box.
.jpg)
Utilizing French, Arabic and Corsican you'll be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn't require subtitles to watch this film, but this is something that also goes to the heart of the story and how we so often associate with that which is familiar and judge those who are different. It's those of us that are able to rise above our differences and embrace them who come out on top. Perhaps what's even more fascinating is that Audiard has used a prison-based gangster drama to get that point across, but to that point, where else could be better?
A Prophet is an art film as much as it is a genre film, and I would never paint it in one corner or the other. Audiard's use of sound, occasional handicapping of the camera lens and his ability to work with Rahim to create a character that is not the stereotypically gun-wielding gangster and instead a boy on the path to becoming a man who simply took a road less traveled is to be commended. Malik has difficulty realizing his goals, step one is to stay alive and step two is something he'll deal with when he's confronted with it. The choice he makes, for better or worse, will define the outcome of his life.
He talks a tough game. He works for no one but himself. His innocence could get him killed just as well as it could earn favor with even the hardest of gangsters. Only in the final moments do we really get a sense Malik knows what he wants from this world. Throughout the story much of what comes to him comes without expectation, but once he learns how easy it is to get what you want that's where the story is only beginning and A Prophet is rightly ending.
Prophet movie review
Near the end of “A Prophet,” one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it.
More About This MovieMuch of what distinguishes “A Prophet” (“Un Prophète”) is revealed in Malik’s brief appreciation of the shoes, as well as the surprise it elicits. He’s window shopping — doesn’t he have some killing to do? Yet these luxury items are resonant, as is their exclusive setting and the way Malik’s admiring gaze momentarily stops the flow of the action: each adds another element to this portrait of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent who is transformed in prison. Over the course of the film Malik will learn to read, to smuggle, to murder, to survive. Which is why when he pauses after unloading his guns, his pale face floating in the sanguineous dark, it looks as if he were emerging from a kind of womb: his metamorphosis is complete.
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“A Prophet” was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film. (His previous one, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” from 2005, is a superb remake of “Fingers,” James Toback’s art-pulp thriller.) Like some other prison tales “A Prophet,” which won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, has the flavor of the ethnographic. Its subject is an individual in a context, and while Malik (Tahar Rahim, a stealth presence) is the story’s focus, he’s also part of an inquiry on power. When he first enters prison for a vague crime involving an assault, he arrives as a relative innocent, but, more important to his trajectory, he’s unschooled both as a criminal and a citizen.
His education is sudden and brutal. The film opens with Malik being ordered to strip for the guards on his arrival, a ritualistic divesting (and humiliation) that the inmates and the prison system continue. He soon attracts the unwelcome attention of César Luciani (the tremendous Niels Arestrup), an old lion who rules over the Corsican gang that controls the prison, including some guards. To protect his own, César orders Malik to murder another prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), also of Arab extraction. Without friends or affiliation, Malik believes he has no choice and carries out the murder with a razor blade that he’s hidden inside his mouth and which he fumbles as the blood gushes over him, his victim, the walls.
It takes a few agonizing moments for Reyeb to die, perhaps because of Malik’s awkwardness, or maybe it just takes a while to bleed to death. At any rate it is a ghastly vision. But it isn’t simply the gore or Reyeb’s twitching body that make the scene difficult to watch: it’s the way the murder has been messily, even frantically staged and filmed, the two men thrashing inside a frame that can barely contain them. There is nothing exciting about the violence, and there are no beauty shots of the pooling blood. Mr. Audiard effectively turns us into witnesses to a horrible crime, though not in order to punish us for our ostensible complicity in the violence. He is instead, I think, insisting on the obscenity of murder.
This insistence is critical to “A Prophet,” as is the way Mr. Audiard wants you to feel revolted by the murder, even as he encourages you to feel something else for Malik by showing, for instance, how his body continues to tremble after Reyeb’s has stopped shuddering. Mr. Audiard doesn’t sex up Malik’s crimes, turning them into easily digestible spectacles, the kind made to accompany a large popcorn and soda. But he doesn’t solicit our pity: Malik is guilty. Yet guilt is like a poisonous gas in this film, it suffuses the prison, permeating the guards’ rooms and the cells in which corrupt lawyers counsel their murderous clients, and the larger world where politicians make decisions that send some to jail while freeing others.
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All this is conveyed discreetly as Malik experiences the banalities of prison along with its shocks, surrealism and spasms of weird comedy. Having killed for César, he essentially surrenders to the Corsicans, for whom he serves a second, parallel sentence and who reward him with racist contempt. César keeps Malik busy running errands, which allows Mr. Audiard to take him (and us) all across the prison and sometimes outside of it. This expands the story and Malik’s horizon, as do some other prisoners, Ryad (Adel Bencherif) and Jordi (Reda Kateb). Every so often Mr. Audiard slows the film down and blacks out some of the image so we can linger on a detail as if to remind us to really look at what we’re watching.
“A Prophet” is about the education of a young man within a specific social order. You could read it as an allegory about France and its uneasy relations with generations of Arab immigrants and their children. As usual, there is room for diverging, even contradictory interpretations, and the political certainly is as much at play here as the Oedipal. Mr. Audiard, for his part, working from a screenplay he wrote with several others, avoids speeches that explain everything and instead opts for a materialist approach that attends to the realities of prison life, showing how guards and porters deliver the prisoners’ food (baguettes!) and how Malik, as he shakes off César’s grip, helps distribute illicit drugs.
Much as he does inside the prison, Mr. Arestrup, who played the thuggish father in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” initially dominates “A Prophet,” boring into the story with unnerving small gestures and the force of his presence. He’s playing another patriarch in this film, of course, the kind who rules small worlds with cruelty. With his overcoats, bulky frame and proud carriage, he can bring to mind the later-life Jean Gabin, though Mr. Arestrup’s terrifying smile quickly snuffs out such nostalgic thoughts. César is not a figure of sentimentality. Among other things he is a businessman, and the cold-bloodedness with which he wields his power might be a matter of personal depravity. It also serves his bottom line.
Like his character, Mr. Rahim’s performance sneaks up from behind. With his wispy mustache and a body that scarcely fills his clothes, Malik makes an unlikely center for such a thrilling film. The camera doesn’t love him, no matter how closely it hovers. But Malik was not meant for our love, and Mr. Rahim’s performance, while strong, is purposefully not flashy, as movie outlaws often are. Mr. Audiard seems to be after something else, and in “A Prophet” he shows us the truth of another human being who might otherwise escape from our sight because he is too foreign, or whom we might try to pity just to feel safe. But the world we make is not necessarily safe, and neither are those we leave alone to fight for their survival.
More About This MovieMuch of what distinguishes “A Prophet” (“Un Prophète”) is revealed in Malik’s brief appreciation of the shoes, as well as the surprise it elicits. He’s window shopping — doesn’t he have some killing to do? Yet these luxury items are resonant, as is their exclusive setting and the way Malik’s admiring gaze momentarily stops the flow of the action: each adds another element to this portrait of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent who is transformed in prison. Over the course of the film Malik will learn to read, to smuggle, to murder, to survive. Which is why when he pauses after unloading his guns, his pale face floating in the sanguineous dark, it looks as if he were emerging from a kind of womb: his metamorphosis is complete.
.jpg)
“A Prophet” was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film. (His previous one, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” from 2005, is a superb remake of “Fingers,” James Toback’s art-pulp thriller.) Like some other prison tales “A Prophet,” which won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, has the flavor of the ethnographic. Its subject is an individual in a context, and while Malik (Tahar Rahim, a stealth presence) is the story’s focus, he’s also part of an inquiry on power. When he first enters prison for a vague crime involving an assault, he arrives as a relative innocent, but, more important to his trajectory, he’s unschooled both as a criminal and a citizen.
His education is sudden and brutal. The film opens with Malik being ordered to strip for the guards on his arrival, a ritualistic divesting (and humiliation) that the inmates and the prison system continue. He soon attracts the unwelcome attention of César Luciani (the tremendous Niels Arestrup), an old lion who rules over the Corsican gang that controls the prison, including some guards. To protect his own, César orders Malik to murder another prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), also of Arab extraction. Without friends or affiliation, Malik believes he has no choice and carries out the murder with a razor blade that he’s hidden inside his mouth and which he fumbles as the blood gushes over him, his victim, the walls.
It takes a few agonizing moments for Reyeb to die, perhaps because of Malik’s awkwardness, or maybe it just takes a while to bleed to death. At any rate it is a ghastly vision. But it isn’t simply the gore or Reyeb’s twitching body that make the scene difficult to watch: it’s the way the murder has been messily, even frantically staged and filmed, the two men thrashing inside a frame that can barely contain them. There is nothing exciting about the violence, and there are no beauty shots of the pooling blood. Mr. Audiard effectively turns us into witnesses to a horrible crime, though not in order to punish us for our ostensible complicity in the violence. He is instead, I think, insisting on the obscenity of murder.
This insistence is critical to “A Prophet,” as is the way Mr. Audiard wants you to feel revolted by the murder, even as he encourages you to feel something else for Malik by showing, for instance, how his body continues to tremble after Reyeb’s has stopped shuddering. Mr. Audiard doesn’t sex up Malik’s crimes, turning them into easily digestible spectacles, the kind made to accompany a large popcorn and soda. But he doesn’t solicit our pity: Malik is guilty. Yet guilt is like a poisonous gas in this film, it suffuses the prison, permeating the guards’ rooms and the cells in which corrupt lawyers counsel their murderous clients, and the larger world where politicians make decisions that send some to jail while freeing others.
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All this is conveyed discreetly as Malik experiences the banalities of prison along with its shocks, surrealism and spasms of weird comedy. Having killed for César, he essentially surrenders to the Corsicans, for whom he serves a second, parallel sentence and who reward him with racist contempt. César keeps Malik busy running errands, which allows Mr. Audiard to take him (and us) all across the prison and sometimes outside of it. This expands the story and Malik’s horizon, as do some other prisoners, Ryad (Adel Bencherif) and Jordi (Reda Kateb). Every so often Mr. Audiard slows the film down and blacks out some of the image so we can linger on a detail as if to remind us to really look at what we’re watching.
“A Prophet” is about the education of a young man within a specific social order. You could read it as an allegory about France and its uneasy relations with generations of Arab immigrants and their children. As usual, there is room for diverging, even contradictory interpretations, and the political certainly is as much at play here as the Oedipal. Mr. Audiard, for his part, working from a screenplay he wrote with several others, avoids speeches that explain everything and instead opts for a materialist approach that attends to the realities of prison life, showing how guards and porters deliver the prisoners’ food (baguettes!) and how Malik, as he shakes off César’s grip, helps distribute illicit drugs.
Much as he does inside the prison, Mr. Arestrup, who played the thuggish father in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” initially dominates “A Prophet,” boring into the story with unnerving small gestures and the force of his presence. He’s playing another patriarch in this film, of course, the kind who rules small worlds with cruelty. With his overcoats, bulky frame and proud carriage, he can bring to mind the later-life Jean Gabin, though Mr. Arestrup’s terrifying smile quickly snuffs out such nostalgic thoughts. César is not a figure of sentimentality. Among other things he is a businessman, and the cold-bloodedness with which he wields his power might be a matter of personal depravity. It also serves his bottom line.
Like his character, Mr. Rahim’s performance sneaks up from behind. With his wispy mustache and a body that scarcely fills his clothes, Malik makes an unlikely center for such a thrilling film. The camera doesn’t love him, no matter how closely it hovers. But Malik was not meant for our love, and Mr. Rahim’s performance, while strong, is purposefully not flashy, as movie outlaws often are. Mr. Audiard seems to be after something else, and in “A Prophet” he shows us the truth of another human being who might otherwise escape from our sight because he is too foreign, or whom we might try to pity just to feel safe. But the world we make is not necessarily safe, and neither are those we leave alone to fight for their survival.
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