How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) begins his six-year prison sentence as a blank slate. He's 19 years old, illiterate, poor; his worn-out shoes are more substantial than his identity. Inside the joint, however, he grows into a criminal mastermind — grows, indeed, into a man with a preternatural ability to see the big picture. How does he do it? Jacques Audiard's complex, beautiful "A Prophet (Un prophéte)" never answers, but it gives some cryptic hints.
The logical response is that he's part Arab and part Corsican, which makes him uniquely suited to playing both sides of the prison community. Soon after he arrives, he gets inducted into the local Corsican gang, headed by a bearded bastard named César Luciani (Niels Arestrup). Naturally, rising through the ranks requires some grisly tasks — a mid-blowjob shanking, among other things — but soon enough Malik becomes César's No. 2, living large in a roomier cell with a DVD player.
When he gets to leave the prison one day at a time (side note: this strikes me as a colossally stupid prison policy), he performs various white-collar transactions in the outside world, meeting with rival gangs and dispatching César's distant foes. Eventually he builds a network of his own, aligning himself with the Arabs and sloughing off César like a lump of dead skin.
The film's internal crime saga is complicated and hard to follow, but its spirituality — the irrational answer to Malik's success — is much stranger. Audiard punctuates the film with imaginative sequences in which Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), Malik's first shank victim, appears to him as a ghost. Smoke pours out of the hole in his neck. Is he an attendant spirit? Is he guiding the way?
Later on, in a chapter called "Récite" (alluding, perhaps, to the beginning revelation of the Prophet Muhammad), Malik achieves higher consciousness during a firefight, lying back blissfully as bullets whizz over his head. Protection is a theme in this film, and he may have God's. But there's also a sense in which Audiard is wary of the tradition of Christ-like prisoners (among them, Cool Hand Luke, Bobby Sands in last year's "Hunger" and Michael Clarke Duncan in "The Green Mile") and he wants Malik to be something different, something challenging — to avoid the type.
"A Prophet" is, no doubt, difficult. It's nearly three hours long and it immerses you in the sights, sounds and almost the smells of an institution only slightly more habitable than "Oz." "Hunger," as powerfully disturbing as it was, could be distant at times because it was so clearly a piece of constructed formalism. This movie, not so much. It bombards you with hostile realism and locks you in the cell with difficult characters. Malik is inscrutable, veering between innocence and arrogance like a child prodigy whose talent happens to be crime. César is a fat blob of menace and hate who becomes scarier when he's more pathetic.
But the film is undoubtedly worth seeing, partially because both performances are amazing and partially because it's good for the soul. It's involving, challenging art. It makes you appreciate freedom, the way a prison movie should.
