A Prophet

A Prophet

Directed by Jacques Audiard

Runtime: 155 min.

BEHIND ITS CAVALCADE of streetkid travails, A Prophet hides sheer contempt for Malik (Tahar Rahim), a 16-year-old Muslim youth sentenced to six years in a French prison. Director Jacques Audiard imitates the latest trend in sociological extravaganzas that detail intricate criminal networks, pretending that violent bravado assesses society’s true, ugly values. The long, pseudo-serious story of Malik’s corruption in prison and how he becomes a kingpin in the Parisian underworld resembles Gomorrah and Il Divo as well as our own yearning-for-epic-status American Gangster. All glorified exploitation-movie gimmicks.

Shockingly, A Prophet has been mistaken for something else; its Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix validates Audiard’s urban clichés as an important view of Europe’s immigrant crisis. In this way it’s as specious as Laurent Cantet’s The Class, another haughty presentation of France’s post-colonial confusion. Bourgeois ethnic guilt mutates into genre excitation; that’s how liberals get to project their fears and simultaneously jack themselves off.

Art movie cognoscenti shame themselves when touting high-minded junk like A Prophet. (Their disdain for social reform reflects how American pundits praised HBO’s The Sopranos yet ignored Oz.) Audiard’s fancy camera and music mannerisms are as trashy and superfluous as a Michael Mann movie: using “Mack the Knife” as a theme doesn’t match Brecht but reveals Audiard’s essential lack of interest in Malik’s culture. This faux pas makes Audiard’s entire conceit bogus—unlike the sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies in Luc Besson’s urban-racial thrillers.

Audiard’s Malik is a one-man rationalization of colonialism’s flaws, in which France’s justice system criminalizes the poor, non-white and immigrant.Tahar Rahim’s open-faced, appealing performance doesn’t excuse the film’s insulting title, A Prophet.This is especially offensive when there is no spiritual awakening. Audiard never accounts for Malik’s illiteracy, his initial crime or his ignorance of Islamic culture. Even after Malik is coerced by the prison’s Corsican gang and forced to spy on and kill other Muslims, A Prophet never develops into a St. Paul or Malcolm X or Frantz Fanon story of political or moral conversion. Its title is merely a euphemism for an epithet.