Okay...
This film is an out-and-out masterpiece. Best film I've seen in the last few years. If there ever was a film that deserved the "another Godfather" hype...Un prophète is it. An amazing work of art.
From Michael J. Anderson at Tativille:
Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (Un prophète, 2009), from an Audriard and Thomas Bidegain screenplay, offers a similar sociological portrait of a France where its older (white) populations are being eclipsed by those of its less assimilated Islamic immigrants. In the case of Audriard's film, this dynamic is expressed through the power relationships that obtain in prison, where a young, non-practicing Muslim, Malik (Tahar Rahim), is forced by the Corsican mafia, headed by the aging César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), into murdering fellow Arab prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi). Hereafter, Malik is visited occasionally by his murdered brother, thus connoting the intimacy between the murdered and murderer, while also providing a schizophrenic corollary to his own position shuttling between the Islamic faith of his birth and the secular world of his white gang. A Prophet indeed lacks Hadewijch's comparative theological dimension, save for Hadewijch's distinction between a devout Islam and a Christianity that has become mere culture - its only presence in A Prophet is in the Christmas holiday, just as in Dumont's film, Christianity apart from Céline (and outside the cloister) is mummified in the well-adorned, empty church.
As the narrative progresses, César is deserted by his fellow Mediterranean inmates, who are moved to an institution closer to their native Corsica following a governmental decree. Consequently, César comes to rely on Malik increasingly as he negotiates the increasing clout of the Muslim block. Malik, however, proves exceedingly adept in his own right, as he navigates this same faction even more shrewdly, while remaining loyal to his boss. Ultimately, Malik's power comes to exceed César's, displacing the power dynamics in the prison onto the Malik-César relationship. At the film's harrowing close, Malik not only refuses to cross the yard to visit with his former master, but indeed has his underlings punch the old man in the gut as he attempts to approach. In A Prophet, political calculation takes precedent over not only loyalty, but also over moral or ethical considerations.
A Prophet accordingly represents a French translation of Martin Scorsese's underworld idiom (cf. Mean Streets, 1973; Casino, 1995), replete with a similarly protean, post-classical style. Like the former, though A Prophet does it better than any Scorsese film in more than a decade-and-a-half, Audiard combines markedly disparate techniques in what is, like the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin equally (Kings and Queen, 2004), a filmmaking notable for its variability. In distinct contrast to Hadewijch's heavily composed, patient images, A Prophet often favors documentary-inflected, jittery hand-held takes, hard cutting and subjective focalization, construed by A Prophet's variations in visual point-of-view and on a soundtrack that in pivotal moments becomes highly conventional in its scoring, while also eliminating ambient sound.
Audriard's film, further, utilizes a prosaic narrative structure that borrows heavily from the televisual long-format that represents the core of high-end American popular culture, with HBO's "The Wire" and "Oz" especially germane in this instance. A Prophet possesses many of their virtues, relying similarly on the character-development that the aforesaid procure over their long durations. In this respect, Audriard's film belongs to this new tele-visual regime, whereas Hadewijch remains very much a work of auteurist art cinema in the classical sense: Dumont's film represents the more constricted artistic communication imparted through its organic, if ever so slightly uneven construction; it suggests not only the short story that is at the medium's core, but the painting medium that signifies in similarly discrete terms. On the other hand, A Prophet maintains a greater scope, relying on its storytelling to impart its arch issues. Though it touches on the same world as Hadewijch, it does so with less immediacy and urgency. Audriard is far more detached from his nonetheless very impressive work.
Technical Information:
Title: Un prophète/A Prophet
Year: 2009
Country: Belgium
Director: Jacques Audiard
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.70 Gb
Length: 2:28:52
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~7800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio 1: Français- Dolby AC3 @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: Français- Dolby DTS @ 768 kb/s
Audio 3: Français- Dolby 5.1 Surround @ 448 kb/s
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None
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