The first twenty-five minutes of Jacques Audiard’s fantastic and bewildering film, Un prophète (A Prophet), leave the audience in the dark about the main character, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim). We do not know why Malik is booked into a French jail. How old is he? Why can’t he read or write? He repeats that he has no friends or family outside the jail, but we don’t know why. All we know is what we see: Malik in jail. Audiard is trying to put us in a similar place as Malik – confining our understanding of the film’s characters and world to the jail.
Un prophète uses jail as a world, not necessarily a microcosm of the real world, but a brutal mirroring of it. It is the setting of a strange coming of age story. When he enters the prison, Malik is closed-off and tries to keep to himself. But a group of Corsican inmates with connections to organized crime (and who more or less run the jail) force Malik to kill Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab who is in the jail for ten days before he will testify at a trial. If Malik doesn’t follow through with the murder, the Corsicans will kill him.
The crime becomes the bedrock upon which Malik builds the rest of his life. After he carries it out, he becomes the Corsicans’ message boy, a job that protects him and earns him privileges in the prison, but ostracizes him from the Arab prisoners, who see him as a traitor to his race. Despite what seems like a mentoring relationship formed between Malik and the Corsican boss, César Luciani (Adel Bencherif), Malik is considered a dimwitted servant by the Italian-speaking mobsters. He is caught between two worlds, a status the young Arab uses to his advantage. With the protection of the Corsicans, yet outside their suspicions, Malik begins to learn how things are done in the prison. He starts dealing drugs on the side, secretly learning Italian to hear his bosses’ conversations, and racks up two years of perfect behavior that earns him precious leave days.
On the surface, Un prophète tells the story of an extraordinarily talented young man who is able to make a wealthy and powerful place for himself in the underworld. He learns and quickly masters the rules of this place and proves himself cleverer than the various subgroups fighting for power and control of the jail. But beyond this central drama, the film has a strange power, one that is introduced by the visions Malik has of Reyeb soon after the murder. We only see fleeting moments of these visitations by Reyeb’s ghost, but we begin to realize throughout the course of the film that they have had a powerful effect on Malik’s growth and maturity, informing his decisions and fueling his drive – not to mention supplying him with almost prophetic premonitions of future events. Our questions about Malik extend to Reyeb – who is he and what does he represent?
The presence of Reyeb transforms Un prophète from an underworld drama into a strange spiritual tale. The film’s title becomes a reference to the prophet, Mohammad, and we begin to see Malik’s particular ability to navigate his surroundings as a mark of some divine touch. We spend the better part of two hours with Malik, and by the end we begin to believe we have come to understand who the young man is. But while we may know more about the facts of Malik’s life than we did at the start, we are befuddled by the nature of his character. What gives Malik his keen ability to orchestrate his rise? How does he seem to always know how events will unfold? What is the ultimate goal of all his ambition? There is something that makes Malik extraordinary, but that same special touch makes him impossible to ever truly understand. In this way, Un prophète itself emerges as a riddle, an entry way into the unfathomable complexity of a human soul. We begin to realize we can never truly know Malik, but that only serves to make us in awe of his existence.
Photo: César Luciani (Adel Bencherif) and Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim). Courtesy of Sony Picture Classics
