Jacques Audiard, Sony Pictures Classics (22/01/10)

Coming on like a steam train with a hard-hitting swagger and ambition, A Prophet builds slowly, but assuredly, before hitting its hammering stride and surging onto the shortlist of all-time crime drama greats.

Throughout this stunningly executed work of living, breathing cinema, there’s never any doubt that French director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) is in full, confident control, with the casting of young French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim clearly making Audiard’s easier with a star-making performance that dominates the film.

In Mr. Rahim’s young prisoner, Malik El Djebena, A Prophet finds the perfect vessel for ushering audiences deep into the dangerously tricky maze of his daily life, balanced precariously between his Arabic ethnicity, his service to Corsican kingpin, César Luciani (an intimidating Niels Arestrup), for whom he works and through which he is allowed to exist, and his own growing dreams. Rahim’s childlike expressiveness and knowledge-hungry eyes do a miraculous job of conveying all his vivid emotions and the simple, underlying desire to survive. And it is that fundamental will to survive that unites A Prophet - one half tender coming-of-age story, the other half a desperate, instinctive climb up the crime ladder – into a profoundly affecting and insightful (and frequently, darkly funny) whole.

Perhaps the primary key to the film’s success within a crowded genre full of classic heavyweights like Goodfellas, The Godfather and City of God is that, like its vaunted forerunners, Audiard and co. have also created a wholly engaging, believable and thrilling world both inside and outside of the prison gates. Playing out for the most part against a grey, high-walled prison backdrop – the most elemental of man-made environments – it’s the basic humanity in the film’s characters that rises out of the colourless surroundings and into the bracingly fresh air of the free world. On the outside, where survival remains a tenuous but far more achievable goal, lives and livings can finally be forged.

A Prophet manages to feel simultaneously intimate and epic, as though this one man’s deeply personal journey is speaking to an immense population of lost but promising young men simply trying to find their way and carve out a space for themselves in spite of the steep odds. Brilliantly making genre conventions his own and coolly sidestepping the clichés, Jacques Audiard deserves consideration not only as one of France’s most exciting directors, but as one of modern cinema’s new leading lights.

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