Yes, we’re still writing TIFF ’09 reviews, we were sick and aching. Deal with it.
Rising French auteur Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” (which won the Grand Prix award at Cannes and is probably the favorite at this point to take the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture) is first notable for the way it differentiates from the director’s previous two films. Both 2005’s soulful, Bressonian “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” (a remake of a James Toback’s wonderful directorial debut) which traces a man’s internal struggle between his masculine and feminine parental influences, and 2002’s Hitchockian thriller “Read My Lips,” about a deaf woman’s resistance to the lure of sin as embodied by a man she lusts for, center around wrenching, human tensions, and find the filmmaker fascinated by the pressures and persuasions that drive people to criminal action. In “A Prophet,” our protagonist, at the outset, is condemned to six years in jail, acting as a spiritual heir to the characters from Audiard’s previous films: he’s a young man whose time of indecision has passed, and we’re never shown what led him to his criminal path nor what crime he committed, in part perhaps because Audiard has shown us that story before.
What we’re given is essentially a blank slate. We know the man’s name is Malik, that he’s 20 years old (at least at the beginning) and that he’s an Arab in a jail block full of Arab-hating French mobsters. And that’s it. In the lead, Tahar Rahim enables as much insight into the mind of his character as the script allows, and the actor particularly shines in the early stages of the film, communicating Malik’s devastating moral decay, which gives “A Prophet’s” first half hour at least some momentum. What Audiard hopes is that we’ll invest our sympathies in Malik because of his extreme circumstances, not because of any individual personality, and that we’ll root for him as he negotiates his way through the jail’s criminal hierarchy. But what Audiard somehow manages to misunderstand is that a man who sacrifices is not necessarily a martyr – or a prophet – and, as evidenced in the overwrought Alexander Desplat score and some painfully obtuse symbolism, the aggrandizement of this criminal borders on the egregious. What’s worse, there’s just no reason for this kind of treatment of the character beyond winning the sympathies of more conservative audience members, and in doing so the filmmaker drowns what works on at least some level as a tense procedural.
If “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” is Audiard’s take on the solitary, prideful criminality of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” then “A Prophet” could be seen as his stab at “A Man Escaped,” the Bresson classic about an imprisoned French Resistance activist whose escape plan is compromised with the arrival of a new cellmate, one who may or may not be a Nazi informer. The conflict in that film becomes whether or not to kill this other man, and it mirrors the struggle in “A Prophet’s” best stretch, when Malik is confronted with the ultimatum of killing at the order of the prison’s reigning godfather, and earning his protection, or to risk being killed himself.
Audiard and Rahim nail the moral and emotional weight of these scenes, doing Bresson proud, but the rest of the film lacks that urgency as well as the strength of “A Man Escaped’s” politically-charged premise. And somewhere towards the end of “A Prophet’s” bloated two and half hour runtime, the film reaches its ‘big moment.’ So as not to spoil anything, I’ll just say this series of scenes rings completely false, and is so heavy-handedly executed that it’s just all the more frustrating that one has to sit through such a drawn-out affair to get there. [C-] –Sam C. Mac
