A Prophet (Un Prophète) (2009)
Directed by Jacques Audiard
First of all, indistinguishable noises, human voices, faint traffic: all the movies Jacques Audiard has made so far begin with a brief sequence of faint noises, before the actual image takes over the screen. The notable exception, Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres) features a hearing-impaired woman who is connecting her hearing aid while no sound is heard whatsoever. Like on a voice recorder: first, random sounds, then a voice begins to speak (“I’ll tell you a story”, the very first words in Audiard’s A Self-Made Hero).This particular way of beginning a film is Audiard’s trademark, though is hardly his invention, being utterly common, at least in European films (a random example: Megatron, Marian Criºan’s short film, who received a Palm d’Or back in 2008, begins this way). The important aspect about the beginning of Audiard’s fifth feature film, A Prophet (Un Prophète), is the way it uses distance and ambiguity for delivering the anti-hero Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim). It’s clearly a matter a style, as it has always been with Audiard in the past years: before actually seeing Malik, we witness unusual noises, first, then the director slowly pulls out a silhouette out of the obscurity, detail by detail, as if the gigantic eye who is supposed to depict the incidents has to adapt first to Malik’s world. Actually, the trick used by Audiard is as simple as it is effective: made by partially covering the lens with a hand, one of the few “special effects” that the grim A Prophet incorporates, named by Audiard „Mano Negra”, it’s supposed to remind the viewer of silent films, who used this kind of image quite often. It will be used on a few occasions in the film, for the dreamy sequences, but also in one of the dialogue scenes with Malik’s paternal figure and somehow mentor, head of the Corsican mafia, Cesar Luciani (a wonderful Niels Arestrup, who steals the show each time he’s into a frame). Here, it’s obvious the image reflects Malik’s subjectivity and point of view, as Cesar addresses Malik watching straight into the camera; in a way, this serves the same purpose as the fantastic photography of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, another French film warmly received at Cannes in the recent years. The fragmentary image at the beginning of the film is equaled by the economy of the script, which barely gives any clues about Malik’s past: he was in a reform school, he is about to go to prison for six years, he has no relatives, he was arrested for assaulting a policeman and – we are about to find out – he is quasi-illiterate. It would be useless to ask more: the way Audiard builds his script, the prison is a vast initiatic device, an ritual-like trajectory waits for him inside, and in that aspect, it doesn’t matter what one knows or has before the ritual takes place; as the director itself underlines, the camera is supposed to be in all the places Malik acquires an education, even if it’s about reading or killing with a razorblade, with the same detachment, as if this is supposed to be pure normality and not a Darwinian raw view of life.
The effort required in order to reach the mysterious characters of A Prophet is certainly rewarded by the brilliant way Audiard suggests their thoughts. There has been serious talk about the appropriateness of Reyeb’s phantom as a double for Malik’s feelings and thoughts. In fact, this trick comes from a screenwriter who used to write comedies and it works mostly as a comic device, in spite of his grim allusions; it works less as the ghost appearing to Macbeth and more as the ghost in Alex de la Iglesia’s dark comedy Crimen ferpecto. The true beauty about Audiard directing has something to do with the way he suggests intimate thoughts through images. First of all, uneasiness: as Malik faces his sentence, early in the film, he stares through a dirty window; later, examined by the warden about his past, he constantly stares through a window at the other unknown prisoners. Then, a little earlier in the film, when he is led to the prison, handcuffed, heis gaze follows through the bars a few people taking an early walk in a park. We can only guess what he’s thinking about: freedom, probably. Eventually, the most eloquent scene for this matter involves a Cesar Luciani who just finds out that he’ll probably spend the rest of his life in prison: the camera doesn’t follow the discussion anymore, but Luciani’s long gaze as he stares through the window, almost like he would want to escape the conversation. As A Prophet happens mostly inside the walls of the penitentiary, Audiard does a great job in depicting the way the characters relate to the exterior, to distances: often, we witness Malik watching through the window and witnessing how the prisoners of another block exchange messages or simply riot, without receiving a proper explanation afterwards: we are so tied to Malik’s point of view that we hardly get to know or sees something that Malik doesn’t. This is mostly why the hip hop or blues driven sequences that break the flow of the film seem inappropriate, after you were used to the initial, slow, elaborate rhythm; even they clearly serve a purpose, inducing dynamics into a film that’s about two hours and a half long, you cannot escape the feeling that Audiard is still emulating the American cinema, even if he obviously cares a lot more about his European roots and influences. While he may still be experimenting with different styles, still searching for its own, Audiard has clearly managed with A Prophet to deliver that smart, arty thriller that he always seemed to direct. Even if, when the stakes are higher, in the second part of the film, the action replaces the masterful character study from the beginning, A Prophet is still a major statement, made mostly à la européene, with a clear intention of deconstructing a genre, with a character-driven plot that took (and still takes) the viewers by surprise.
