DVD Review: Un Prophete (2009)

THE ANTI-HERO

By Joyojeet Pal

The curious thing about a critically-acclaimed French film is that it can end at pretty much any scene after roughly the 80-minute mark, and thus would be the permanent pause of that artistic expression. Un Prophete director, Jacques Audiard, frequently finds himself on the wrong side of the critic community, since his films are considered a bit too entertaining. Disappointingly, perhaps, all the ends are tied.

The crime thriller has traditionally offered an outlet for a nice bit of French anti-establishment romanticism, the icon of which was the anti-hero. Right from the pre-WW2 days, French cinema has loved the morally complex character – a gangster, a pickpocket, rather than the private detective or maverick policeman, typically much more favoured across the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the war and the series of internal class and postcolonial upheavals, the morally ambiguous protagonist came to be an essential element of the thriller genre under directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, and actors like Alain Delon made an entire careers playing sullen badboys.

For a large part of the 50s and 60s, the gangster film was perhaps France’s most successful genre in popular cinema. Given the intersection of the era with the New Wave and its intellectual auteur-driven cinema, the films featured an unusual emphasis on the emotional depth of the protagonist, as if to offset the otherwise ‘bourgeois’ or rather ‘un-Frenchness’ in the popular appeal of the gangster film.

To set the comparison straight, the typical American noir also frequently featured an anti-hero, but the narrative emphasis on the character there was somewhat secondary to the plot. Looking back through the classic French anti-heroes like Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, Michel in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, or Jef Costello in Melville’s Le Samourai, the films are practically character studies. The eventual comeuppance is both darkly obvious from the start, and irrelevant to the fact that the audience will find no choice but to relate to the doomed protagonist.

Un Prophete is essentially a character study. That said, it would be deeply unfair to the film to attribute Audiard’s exploration of Malik el Djibena (Tahar Rahim), the protagonist, to any attempt to be popular yet intellectually deep. The film is an honest, tense, and fast-paced thriller, which while keeping with the French tradition of iconizing its protagonists is nonetheless a compelling tale of a young man’s survival through the prison system. It is also different from the classic French crime caper in one critical way. The protagonist is French Arab.

Malik, a 19-year-old illiterate thug, is sentenced to six years in jail. He is unaffiliated with no real connections in prison, and is a prime target for a Corsican gang, which needs an Arab insider to carry out its dirty work. The Corsicans control the prison, and the young man does not have much of a choice but to agree. His task is to gain the confidence of an Arab prisoner, and slash his throat with a blade hidden his mouth.

From a clueless ingénue, Malik starts unwittingly on a path to learning the ropes, primarily guided by his instinct to survive. His mentor in the game is the vicious Corsican boss Cesar Luciani (Neils Arestrup), who is somewhere between a slave-master and a sadistic parent to the young man. As the token Arab in the Corsican gang, he is reviled by fellow Arabs in the prison. At the same time, excluded by race, he seems to have limited long-term potential of ascendancy within the Corsican gang. Malik is essentially nobody’s man.

As he learns the ropes, Luciani assigns him to jobs of greater responsibility, by arranging day passes for Malik to leave the prison. As the give-and-take between the two turns increasingly towards a cat-and-mouse game, Malik’s meekness becomes his strength. 

From being the Corsicans’ Arab in the prison, Malik soon becomes ‘their Arab’ outside of it. The film is cleverly placed at an interesting historical juncture where the control over the Marseilles underworld is gently segueing from the Corsicans to the Arabs. Malik soon becomes a pivotal point in the relationship between the various players in the underworld, and a man of his own.

Audiard does an exceptional job showing the progression of the young man from a naïve thug to a seasoned criminal. The extent to which Audiard draws the viewer into the narrative is evident in the way that we, just like the other characters in the film, see Malik as an effectively meek, inoffensive, potentially vulnerable, and ideologically neutral guy. His eventual rise is not only unsurprising, but is something Audiard makes us actively root for.

In his last film, The Beat my Heart Skipped Audiard does a stunning character sketch of a thug, who incidentally also wants to be a concert pianist. As the days go closer to his big performance, the audience is left in unbearable tension each time the protagonist uses his hands to throws a punch or stops short. Un Prophete lacks the immediate tension of his last film, but leaves the audience with a more meandering discomfort over the happenings in the jail. There is no single turning point in the film – instead there are several instances, each of which draws us deeper till our anxiety almost comes to a boil, only to pull back.

While Audiard is notorious for brushing off any over-intellectualizing about his characters and motivations, the film is nonetheless a complex allegory for contemporary French society. The relationship between Luciani and Malik is central to the film’s progression, and a number of class and race issues are sub-texted in their interactions. Malik’s remains subservient to the Corsicans well after he has ‘paid his dues’ and for the most part, it surprises nobody. The film leaves little to your imagination – the title, really does not mean much. Malik grows to be something of a prophet in his ability to navigate the system, but there is neither a messianic nor even a deeply symbolic connection. There are several great scenes, one that stands out is when Malik involuntarily opens his mouth wide during a routine airline security check, an indicator of how deeply the prison lives within him.

The film belongs to Malik and Luciani. Tahar Rahim, who plays the more difficult of the two roles, is exceptional as the character you cannot quite read. He is effortlessly good at being the guy you think you can trust, you think someone should help out, you think may be vulnerable, until he turns it around, and then you take another look at him and aren’t really surprised at all. Nonetheless, the one who sets the screen on fire is the mentor/nemesis. Neils Arestrup who plays Luciani is a regular in Audiard’s films, and apparently during the early filming, the director gave Arestrup the analogy of “a lion playing with his food” on how to treat his relationship with Malik in the film. In doing it with effortless élan, Luciani serves us Malik on a platter -- the most recent in a long line of memorable French anti-heroes.

Classic French Anti-Heroes in Crime Dramas

Film	Year	Director	Character	Actor
Pépé le Moko (Pepe from Marseille)	1937	Julien Duvivier	Pepe	Jean Gabin
Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!)	1954	Jacques Becker	Max le Menteur	Jean Gabin
Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi)	1955	Jules Dassin	Tony le Stephanois	Jean Servais
Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler)	1956	Jean-Pierre Melville	Bob Montagné	Roger Duchesne
Pickpocket	1959	Robert Bresson	Michel	Martin LaSalle
Classe tous risques (The Big Risk)	1960	Claude Sautet	Abel Davos	Lino Ventura
À bout de soufflé (Breathless)	1960	Jean-Luc Goddard	Michel Poiccard	Jean-Paul Belmondo
Les Tontons flingeurs (Crooks in clover)	1963	Georges Lautner	Fernand Naudin	Lino Ventura
Le deuxième soufflé (The second wind)	1966	Jean-Pierre Melville	Gustave Minda	Lino Ventura
Le Samourai (The Samurai)	1967	Jean-Pierre Melville	Jef Costello	Alain Delon
Le cergle rouge (The red circle)	1970	Jean-Pierre Melville	Corey	Alain Delon
36 Quai des Orfèvres (Department 36)	2004	Olivier Marchal	Léo Vrinks	Daniel Auteuil
L’instinct de mort (Killer Instinct)	2008	Jean-François Richet	Jacques Mesrine	Vincent Cassel

Disclaimer: Un Prophete is as much a man’s film, in terms of a certain expression of masculinity. Perhaps Sex and the City would serve as a gender corollary. All the major roles are male, all the perspectives and actions are that of male characters, as is the review presented here.