MOVIE: A PROPHET

Grim, gritty, violent, and almost entirely set in a prison, A Prophet is by no means a glorification of crime and neither is it a seat-of-the-pants action thriller with twists and turns at every corner. Yet it is about criminals and it is a thriller, but within a slow human drama that is as much about growth and friendship as it is about organised crime and power. The vehicle of Jacques Audiard’s epic – a Grand Prix winner at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival – is Malik (Tahar Rahim), a part Arab, part Corsican 19-year-old thrown into a proper prison for the first time after a lifetime of juvenile correctional facilities. There he finds a world split between Arabs and Corsicans but belonging to neither. Scared, fragile and alone, Malik is forced for his own preservation to join the Corsicans, who use him and never accept him but open the door for him to survive and stake out his own destiny. With subtlety and introspection, Rahim delivers a real human being full of intelligence and emotion, and we watch his character learn, grow and mature but rarely lose sight of his conscience in a world ruled by brutality and self interest. “The title acts as a sort of injunction, moving people to consider something which isn’t necessarily developed in the film – namely, that we are dealing with a little prophet, a new prototype of a guy,” Audiard explains. “Basically, we wanted to make an anti-Scarface.” (MG)