Un Prophète: A Remarkable Education

Jacques Audiard's new film shows how prison can offer more opportunities to a young French Muslim than life on the outside.

Only a French director could make a film that is the perfect inversion of the American Dream. Un prophète is the story of the remarkable prison education of Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a 19-year old French Muslim who is alienated from his community, estranged from his family, and seems destined for a life of petty crime and imprisonment.

Sentenced to six years in an adult facility for allegedly beating up a cop, Malik is selected by imprisoned Corsican mafia boss César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) to kill another prisoner who is scheduled to testify against the mob. Committing the murder of Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), who subsequently appears to both haunt and protect Malik, is his first lesson in this Bildungsroman. The second is learning to read. Over the next six years, Malik proves an able student, first of Luciani, and later of a drug-dealing friend named Jordi (Reda Kateb).

Indeed, with creative ingenuity, the requisite level of risk-taking befitting an up-and-coming criminal entrepreneur, and an ability to simultaneously play the roles of submissive acolyte and model prisoner, Malik proves himself to be the better of his master. By the time Malik “graduates” from prison into the real world, he has truly established himself in his vocation, has a bright future ahead of him, and even a potential family in waiting.

Director Jacques Audiard, who also had his hand in writing the screenplay, has created a masterpiece that has been favourably compared with Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series. However, whereas Coppola’s Michael Corleone reluctantly takes on the mantle of the family business, Audiard’s Malik el Djebena is truly a self-made man – an initiator of an empire, not its inherited son.

Of course, the cruel irony of the film is that there are few opportunities for young and disenfranchised Muslim men in France today – in the banlieues of Paris, approximately 35 per cent are unemployed. That a clearly intelligent and quick-thinking young man finds greater opportunities in prison than in his brief life before his incarceration is both a telling and realistic commentary on French society.

The relatively unknown Rahim portrays Malik in all the stages of his young life with full force and integrity; his early fear and later hard-won self-confidence are completely believable. Clearly an actor to watch, and somewhat reminiscent of early Benicio del Toro. Equally compelling in his swagger and slow self-realization of his eroding power is Niels Arestrup as César.

The mise-en-scène brings to life the business and governance of prison with precision and attention to detail – a visual interpretation of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. We see the accrual of Malik’s power through the items he collects in his cell. The pecking order of the inmates is revealed through the positioning and movement of the actors on the set, particularly in the prison yard.

If one complaint can be voiced, it is that the lesser characters are little more than temporary props to the larger machinations of the leads, making a few of the many twists and turns of the complex plot sometimes difficult to follow. For this reason alone, it merits a second screening, and further mental rumination.

Nevertheless, the overall narrative is brutally compelling, and it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that Malik el Djebena will soon be known alongside Michael Corleone in the cinematic pantheon as a criminal we can not only sympathize with, but come to admire.