Un prophète (A Prophet)

A Prophet—a long movie of the kind that gets called gritty by critics, signifying its value as honest, honestly, even while potential viewers slump their shoulders a little bit because they now know it’s going to be less fun—is actually quite good. Malik, our unremitting protagonist whose presence fills every second if not every frame, is surprisingly and intensely sympathetic. If his environs are undeniably and pointedly contemporary, his story nonetheless has the ring of the classic to it, of fathers and sons and even of the biblical. But it is young and exhilaratingly unformed at the same time, and though there might be father figures, the film is conspicuously absent a true father; this story is Malik’s alone.

And from unwilling and unknowing entry inmate to killer and back again, it is his persuasively. It is a simple but strong compliment to say that a fictional character is empathetic, that his evolution is believable and compelling, and Malik’s youthful intelligence, his ambition that arises apropos of nothing except his youth, is convincing in the slow, visceral way it should be. He and his film demand respect both.

His initiation comes early in the long narrative, a messy, labored killing of a man in response to another threat of death. The starkly gruesome scene—there is little pleasure in watching it—hangs in a surreal aura over Malik for the next several years and all of our time with him, which director Jacques Audiard lets loose with startling and even wondrous technique from time to time. I would not have thought that surrealist impulses would make sense in this case, or that occasionally mannerist touches like a title card with the name of a significant character, or softly blacking out the screen except for some small, crucial detail would work in a film like this; but I would have been wrong. Perhaps they work because of the director’s and actor’s (called Tahar Rahim by the way, no idea what else he’s been in but fantastic here) discipline in execution, because this is not a film made on sheer impulse to genius or creative meanderings. It is regimented and open at the same time, constructed and told in such a way that it mirrors and does justice to its subject.

Its moral and visual palette are strict and circumscribed, and grow in response to each other. Their formality progresses with the narrative, and by the end of the film have each discovered some sort of stability (if not quite the usefulness of a tripod) and found a heft lacking before, filling in the monochrome with richer blacks and softer whites. By the end neither has quite found solidity, or even a structure to follow up on the narrative, which is maybe as it should be. But the insistently realistic treatment almost makes you wish for a framework to lend it weight, for a camera exterior to his world by which to view it.

It is this location within his world that guides the film aesthetically and otherwise, and which makes it tempting to declare something lacking, but not in the sense that it didn’t aim high enough. A Prophet shies away from the more spectacular means and effects of film, a decision to be lauded, but not one that necessitates going to the other end of the spectrum either. To be sure, it doesn’t quite go there, and the directorial presence is subtle but unmistakable. But somehow, the emotional impact was just a touch behind the intellectual and narrative one, just a shade less effective than the rest of it. Perhaps to force it into lockstep would have been a melodramatization and had the ring of something untrue; as it stands, I saw it and I lived it, but I never quite felt it.

In the film, as Malik passes trial after trial, it is tempting to see each moment as the moment of truth. So often, coming of age is portrayed as the decision made in a single instant, a dichotomy offered without a chance to consider it: forwards or backwards? Childhood or adulthood? Are you a boy or a man? But A Prophet eludes that reasoning. Malik’s growth can be measured in the instants for sure, but their plenitude renders his metamorphosis continual rather than instantaneous. He moves and changes and kills, and will continue to do so even after the last reel has played out. There is something of a reward at the conclusion, for both the audience and their protagonist, but the more lasting revelation is of Malik’s simultaneity: he is still the same person he was at the start. His contradictions are essential, his negotiations between extremes the thing itself. It feels true but not right, over but not finished; so all is as it should be, while at the same time it isn’t, an astute observation and spur to action both, and very much a film worth seeing.