Genre: Crime Drama
Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Tahir Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif
Running Time: 150 minutes (plus trailers)
"You think you can last here without protection?"
Winner of the Grand Prix (the sec
ond most prestigious award of the festival, behind the coveted Palm D’Or) at the acclaimed Cannes film festival, and Frances nominee for Best Foreign Language Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, Jacques Audiards film Un Prophète has all the trappings of an epic crime drama. Over the course of its two and a half hour runtime, it chronicles the shifting power dynamic in a French prison, as nineteen year old French-Arab Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives at the beginning of a six year stretch and finds himself a reluctant soldier of the Corsican mafia. Race and loyalty collide as Malik is slowly hardened from a naïve and frightened boy to a dangerous and opportunistic criminal, until even the Corsican’s lose control of the creature that they had a hand in creating.
In a quote from their five star review of this film, The Times newspaper called Un Prophète “as epic as The Godfather”. Now any time a movie is compared to what is consider the greatest movie of all time, you’re going to be reviewing it on a curve. Do I think it is as good as The Godfather, and therefore, logically, the greatest movie of all time? No, I don’t (I also think The Godfather is rather overrated, but that’s a conversation for another time). But the comparison is certainly understandable, as Malik’s journey is not dissimilar to Michael Corleone’s, in that he does not begin the film with any real criminal ambitions. All he is really interested in doing is surviving, but in the brutal reality of a maximum security prison, survival often comes down to kill or be killed.
The most successful element of Un Prophète (and indeed, any prison drama – one of my favourite television shows of all time is the HBO series Oz) is the setting itself. Whilst no one in their right minds would ever want to go to jail, there is something terrifyingly compelling about a story set in a prison. The idea that violence can happen at any time, without any reason or warning, provides prison drama’s with a sickening and believable tension that no other location can equal. They are a place where law and justice have been abandoned, where all semblance of society has been lost, replaced by animal brutality and cunning. The best portion of this film is the opening twenty minutes, in which Malik is told by the Corsican’s that he must kill a fellow inmate or face death himself. The fear and uncertainty in him carries over to the audience, and as he gets closer and closer to the deed, the apprehension is almost unbearable.
Unfortunately, as Malik’s sentences drags on, the film too begins to move more slowly. A runtime of over two hours is of course another trait of your typical crime saga (or at least of films with aspirations of being “sagas”), but honestly, Un Prophète doesn’t quite succeed in justifying it’s length. It’s not that the movie was bad – on the contrary, it’s mostly very good. But with the exception of that opening act, there wasn’t a lot in the movie that was particularly memorable. The acting is very good, there are some great soundtrack choices and the story itself is strong. But it did occur to me as the closing credits rolled,that they could brought the ending forward an hour and my appreciation for the film wouldn’t really be any less. Nor do I think that my understanding of Malik’s character or his situation would have suffered.
Un Prophète tells a good story, and I certainly don’t regret having watched it. But the truth of the matter is that one hundred and fifty minutes is a very long time to sit still, and if a film is going to be that long, it needs to be more than simply good. Add to that the fact you’re reading subtitles for that entire time (not a large complaint, but certainly something that starts to wear on you after a while) and by the last half hour I felt less as if I was enjoying the movie and more as though I was sitting through it. Perhaps I'm simply impatient. Where they should have made the cuts I honestly don’t know; what I do know is that despite liking the movie, I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anyone other than hardcore film enthusiasts, or people who have a lot of time on their hands.
A Prophet is now playing in limited release in Australia, and will open in the United States of February 26th
Note the total lack of dialogue in this trailer, something that I was complaining about just the other day.
Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Tahir Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif
Running Time: 150 minutes (plus trailers)
"You think you can last here without protection?"
Winner of the Grand Prix (the sec
ond most prestigious award of the festival, behind the coveted Palm D’Or) at the acclaimed Cannes film festival, and Frances nominee for Best Foreign Language Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, Jacques Audiards film Un Prophète has all the trappings of an epic crime drama. Over the course of its two and a half hour runtime, it chronicles the shifting power dynamic in a French prison, as nineteen year old French-Arab Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives at the beginning of a six year stretch and finds himself a reluctant soldier of the Corsican mafia. Race and loyalty collide as Malik is slowly hardened from a naïve and frightened boy to a dangerous and opportunistic criminal, until even the Corsican’s lose control of the creature that they had a hand in creating.In a quote from their five star review of this film, The Times newspaper called Un Prophète “as epic as The Godfather”. Now any time a movie is compared to what is consider the greatest movie of all time, you’re going to be reviewing it on a curve. Do I think it is as good as The Godfather, and therefore, logically, the greatest movie of all time? No, I don’t (I also think The Godfather is rather overrated, but that’s a conversation for another time). But the comparison is certainly understandable, as Malik’s journey is not dissimilar to Michael Corleone’s, in that he does not begin the film with any real criminal ambitions. All he is really interested in doing is surviving, but in the brutal reality of a maximum security prison, survival often comes down to kill or be killed.
The most successful element of Un Prophète (and indeed, any prison drama – one of my favourite television shows of all time is the HBO series Oz) is the setting itself. Whilst no one in their right minds would ever want to go to jail, there is something terrifyingly compelling about a story set in a prison. The idea that violence can happen at any time, without any reason or warning, provides prison drama’s with a sickening and believable tension that no other location can equal. They are a place where law and justice have been abandoned, where all semblance of society has been lost, replaced by animal brutality and cunning. The best portion of this film is the opening twenty minutes, in which Malik is told by the Corsican’s that he must kill a fellow inmate or face death himself. The fear and uncertainty in him carries over to the audience, and as he gets closer and closer to the deed, the apprehension is almost unbearable.Unfortunately, as Malik’s sentences drags on, the film too begins to move more slowly. A runtime of over two hours is of course another trait of your typical crime saga (or at least of films with aspirations of being “sagas”), but honestly, Un Prophète doesn’t quite succeed in justifying it’s length. It’s not that the movie was bad – on the contrary, it’s mostly very good. But with the exception of that opening act, there wasn’t a lot in the movie that was particularly memorable. The acting is very good, there are some great soundtrack choices and the story itself is strong. But it did occur to me as the closing credits rolled,that they could brought the ending forward an hour and my appreciation for the film wouldn’t really be any less. Nor do I think that my understanding of Malik’s character or his situation would have suffered.
Un Prophète tells a good story, and I certainly don’t regret having watched it. But the truth of the matter is that one hundred and fifty minutes is a very long time to sit still, and if a film is going to be that long, it needs to be more than simply good. Add to that the fact you’re reading subtitles for that entire time (not a large complaint, but certainly something that starts to wear on you after a while) and by the last half hour I felt less as if I was enjoying the movie and more as though I was sitting through it. Perhaps I'm simply impatient. Where they should have made the cuts I honestly don’t know; what I do know is that despite liking the movie, I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anyone other than hardcore film enthusiasts, or people who have a lot of time on their hands.
A Prophet is now playing in limited release in Australia, and will open in the United States of February 26th
Note the total lack of dialogue in this trailer, something that I was complaining about just the other day.
