Having won prestigious awards at Cannes, the London Film Festival and the BAFTAs, as well as receiving a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, Jacques Audiard’s hugely acclaimed film finally hits DVD. A Prophet follows Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), an Arab who arrives in prison to serve a six year sentence. Preyed on by the other inmates and having no connections of his own, he is forced to accept protection from a Corsican Mafia group in return for carrying out tasks for them.
The film’s great strength is its sense of realism, and so it succeeds best when employing an approach that’s relatively free of stylisation. In particular, the first half hour or so is excellent. Within minutes, director Audiard (formerly best known for The Beat That My Heart Skipped) has created a convincing world and thrust us right into its midst; relentlessly pursuing uncomfortable situations that we don’t want to experience but can’t look away from. In a brutal sequence of extraordinary power, Malik kills another inmate during a desperate struggle with a razor blade.
It’s a little disappointing, then, when we see this initial, visceral promise transforming into a more conventionally stylish crime thriller – even if it’s a fairly well executed one. The measured pace and very sparing use of subtle music gives way to a montage of the hustle and bustle of underhand criminal activity in the prison, set to blaring rap music: we’ve seen all this before. And at various points Malik hallucinates that the inmate he killed at the beginning of the film is in his cell watching him, which both borders on cliché and seems a pointless and underdeveloped device here. Also, the momentary freeze frames when new characters like crime lord ‘The Egyptian’ are introduced are reminiscent of a Guy Ritchie film.
These unwelcome features and the predictable A-to-B story arc, which follows the ascendance of an underdog to the position of crime boss, provide a sense of familiarity that jar with the painfully uncomfortable (in a good way) opening scenes, and suggest that A Prophet might have been better had it been a starker and more determinedly realist film.
As it stands, A Prophet is a hard-going two-and-a-half hours, but I’m not sure how rewarding it ultimately is. It seems to me rather thin thematically, not to mention emotionally lacking and perhaps morally non-commital, too. The prison setting and the grittiness evident in the first few minutes immediately put me in mind of previous Cannes success Hunger (2008); a superficial comparison but an unfortunate one given that A Prophet’s lack of depth and its uneven tone mean that it’s certainly not in that league. Some impressively, compellingly grim sequences nonetheless.
If you are a fan of the film or are considering seeing it, it’s worth picking up the DVD because it has a whole second disc of extras. Especially illuminating are the deleted scenes with commentary from the director. By showing us what was left out and explaining why, Audiard gives a real insight into the decisions that helped shape the film to fit his vision.
Overall Verdict: A solid prison drama, but no masterpiece.
Special Features:
Deleted scenes (with Director’s commentary)
Trailer
A Prophet Revealed cast and crew featurette
Tahar Rahim screentests
Rehearsals
Derriere les barreaux from Antonin Peretjako
Un Prophete a Chatenay from Jean-Michel Carreia
Reviewer: Tom René