The Asphalt Jungle

The Best of 2009 - #2

February 19th, 2010 by Raj Ranade

Fareed and Raj agree on something.

Fareed:

A Prophet (dir. by Jacques Audiard) - Had Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” aimed to make a prison film, it would have been perfect. Had he strove to craft just a film noir, it would have been perfect.  Yet the French filmmaker is not satisfied solely with making a perfect genre film - he has far more ambitious aims. With the story of a French Arab convict who manipulates all sides of his prison environment, Audiard crafts a complex portrait of modern day France, hopelessly struggling with the tensions of multiculturalism. Audiard’s executes this lofty sociological aim flawlessly thus creating a film that completely astonishes.

On paper, “A Prophet” seems part and parcel, almost derivatively so, with the anti-hero tradition established in Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” series. It too features a charismatic protagonist that comes into reality rife with dissension who plays all sides as easily as a puppet master controls a marionette. The one narrative element that fuels Audiard’s film and permits it to rise above all other imitators, is the deft incorporation of magical realism.

Shortly after the hero Malik arrives in prison, the resident crime lord orders him to take out an undesirable element. Malik executes the troublesome prisoner only to be haunted by his ghost. The supernatural element, however, is much more than just a gimmick. That this entity lingers over the protagonist for the entire film, and serve as a shocking reminder of the corrosive consequences of ambition. That the ghost is also of Arabic descent crystallizes just how forcefully Malik cleaves himself from his roots during his almost inevitable ascent to the top.  Although Audiard allows the viewer to experience the exhilaration that comes with the accumulation of power, these unique narrative elements poignantly identify how such gains can wear away at one’s humanity and central identity.

In the hands of a lesser director, the various elements of noir, the prison film, and even the supernatural could have made the production into an unsatisfying tonal hodgepodge. Audiard, however, is a true master of his craft and part of the excitement of the production, is watching a true artist at work whose directorial and narrative gambles pay off brilliantly.  Using the prison environment as an extreme model of France’s varying cultural dynamics, allows the filmmaker to visually frame a culture with a fractured sense of self. The prison yard, where native Europeans face the immigrants, audaciously indicts today’s France as a place where assimilation is impossible. Infusing this cultural lament into such a visceral tale ensures that “A Prophet” is a far more affecting document about today’s French society than the far more restrained “The Class.”

On the screen, the ambitious “Un Prophet” is one of the most blazingly unique and exquisitely executed films in years. The film “never ceases to engross or transcend the boundaries of its genre.” It heralds Jacques Audiard not simply as a great filmmaker, but as a modern-day Kurosawa.

Raj:

A Prophet (dir. by Jacques Audiard) - Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” is a film that is expansive and intimate, realist and stylized, political and personal. It’s a film that’s been crafted with incredible technical and artistic skill, but it’s really an audience picture, a muscular gut-punch of a story. Most gratifyingly, it seemingly came out of nowhere – Audiard’s previous pictures are thrillers that are skilled enough in execution, but they certainly didn’t indicate that he was capable of something like this.

What Audiard has done here is to depict a story with epic sweep largely in terms of individual physical sensation – tactile filmmaking that beautifully evokes the gritty feel of every situation. Consider our protagonist hiding that razor blade in his mouth, forgoing beach resort sex to soak his toes in the surf, or being deafened by loud gunfire – in its merging of micro and macro detail, Audiard’s accomplishment approaches Terrence Malick’s masterpiece “The New World” and its unified theory of filmmaking. Audiard even extends this sensory touch to the magical realism in his film – few images in film this year resonate as strongly as the ghost with the flaming finger candle, taunting Malik with the one-year anniversary of his moral corruption.

And there’s still so much else going on! The sketching of factions and power dynamics within the jail is done with fascinating complexity, the story of a mentored young man seizing control of the throne has a grand Shakespearean quality, and the allegory of the changing ethnic face of France and the resulting strife has powerful and insightful bite. Most of all, though, the film beautifully illustrates a man making something of himself, learning and growing and achieving a hard-bitten, valuable new life. If any film deserved the title “An Education”, it would be this one.

Furthermore, I think we have the birth of a new star here in Tahar Rahim. To make my own outlandish comparison after Fareed’s Audiard-Kurosawa thing, I see a lot of young Brando in this diminutive but seething-with-intensity actor. Brando had the great ability to depict characters hiding wounded, vulnerable souls through a façade of aggression and machismo, which Rahim does with great aplomb. Furthermore, Rahim is tremendously effective at illustrating Malik’s progress in life – his face initially indicates blank, stupid incomprehension of the new world he has entered into, but you see new glimmers of intelligence and scheming in his face in every subsequent scene.  Indeed, Rahim is the perfect person to complete Audiard’s wondrous, stirring epic.

Entry Filed under: Best of 2009