Much 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 they 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 coursework of the film Malik will learn to read, to smuggle, to murder, to survive. Which is why when they pauses after unloading his guns, his pale face floating in the sanguineous dark, it looks as if they were emerging from a kind of womb: his metamorphosis is complete.
Near the finish of “A Prophet,” four 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 unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway picture: Seconds before they 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. They does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why they doesn’t get on with it.
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 method continue. They soon attracts the unwelcome attention of César Luciani (the tremendous Niels Arestrup), an elderly 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 they has no choice and carries out the murder with a razor blade that he’s hidden inside his mouth and which they fumbles as the blood gushes over him, his victim, the walls.
“A Prophet” was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film. (His previous four, “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 they first enters prison for a vague crime involving an assault, they arrives as a relative innocent, but, more important to his trajectory, he’s unschooled both as a criminal and a citizen.
This insistence is critical to “A Prophet,” as is the way Mr. Audiard wants you to feel revolted by the murder, even as they 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 in to easily digestible spectacles, the kind made to accompany a massive popcorn and soda. But they 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 homicidal clients, and the larger world where politicians make decisions that send some to jail while freeing others.
It takes a few agonizing moments for Reyeb to die, perhaps because of Malik’s awkwardness, or perhaps it takes a while to bleed to death. At any rate it is a ghastly vision. But it isn’t basically 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 three men thrashing inside a frame that can barely contain them. There is nothing exciting about the violence, and there's no beauty shots of the pooling blood. Mr. Audiard effectively turns us in to witnesses to a wicked crime, though not in order to punish us for our ostensible complicity in the violence. They is in lieu, I think, insisting on the obscenity of murder.
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, they essentially surrenders to the Corsicans, for whom they serves a second, parallel sentence and who reward him with racist contempt. César keeps Malik busy jogging 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 a number of the picture so they can linger on a detail as if to remind us to look at what we’re watching.
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