A Prophet

by Michael Bergeron

A few weeks ago when the Oscars were being announced I was as surprised as anyone when a film from Argentina won best foreign film. This must be one heck of a film because the two films in that category that I'd actually seen, The White Ribbon and A Prophet (Un prophète), were among the best foreign films that have unreeled domestically in recent memory.
A Prophet takes place in the confines of a French prison and the brutality witnessed is only matched by the depth of our understanding the motives of the protag, Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena.
Director Jacques Audiard will be familiar to regular viewers of foreign fare from his previous films The Beat That My Heart Skipped (a remake of James Toback's Fingers) and Read My Lips. Audiard has a deft method of revealing character traits often leading the audience down a dark path before exposing the light at the end of the trail.
Malik - it's not important what his crime is so much as the fact that he's incarcerated as another nameless face - finds his loyalty to his Arab roots challenged when he's approached by the prison's ruling clique of Corsican mobsters. Malik is unceremoniously informed that he must kill a Turkish prisoner or the Corsican's will kill him. When he tries to go up the chain of command and report this to the warden Malik finds that the guards are in cahoots with the Corsicans.


A Prophet chronicles Malik's time behind bars and at times you want to squirm in your seat. When he gets released for 12 hours at a time on a day pass Malik runs errands for the mob while secretly starting his own drug running operation. Eventually Malik pulls a power play that involves subterfuge and manipulation of the now dwindling-in-numbers Corsicans as well as imprisoned Muslims who themselves form an orderly clique.
Throughout his sentence Malik has dreams that help guide him to safety at crucial times. There's also the ghost of the man Malik killed earlier on, at one point puffing a cig while the smoke ventilates through the slit in his throat with which Malik ended his life. A Prophet is currently playing at the River Oaks Three.