Un prophète (A Prophet)
2009
****
Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, HichemYacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Antoine Basler, Leïla Bekhti, Pierre Leccia
Like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Jacques Audiard's follow-up is a story about a troubled young man caught in the middle. Malik is a 19-year-old Algerian French man who starts his six-year sentence for attacking a police officer. The new, insecure, and illiterate inmate immediately catches the eye of César, whose Corsican gang runs the prison. César promises to take Malik under his wing if he kills a Muslim snitch. Malik is caught between his adopted Corsican family and his Muslim brothers, but he slowly grows in confidence, or is he just looking out for himself? This sounds like a rather ordinary prison film, but Audiard uses the clichéd set-up to tell gripping crime and coming-of-age stories, to depict the perplexities of a multicultural society and to condemn the correctional system which builds criminals. It's a long drama but the character arcs are well developed and wonderfully played (Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup in particular).
