Full Cannes Film Festival coverage

As the Cannes film festival reaches its midpoint, a clear front-runner has emerged. It seems almost inconceivable that another picture with the ambition, scope and compelling dramatic impetus of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet will emerge in this year’s competitive line up. And if the jury fail to award at least one of the main prizes to Audiard’s opus, there will be riots on the Croisette.

Hitherto best known for the critically well-received The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Read My Lips and A Self Made Hero, Audiard reaches a new level with this impeccably modulated prison drama. This is exhilarating filmmaking, a movie which instantly takes its place alongside the greats of the crime movie genre. Critics in Cannes were quick to draw comparisons between the film and last year’s acclaimed mafia picture Gomorrah. But it’s not too much of a stretch to place A Prophet in the same league as The Godfather series. It’s that good.

The film follows the prison career of Malik El Djebena, a green new inmate who arrives in jail as an illiterate 19-year-old without friends and without hope. His rise through the ranks and his negotiation of the treacherous maze of allegiances and alliances is, for the most part, depicted with brutal and often bloody realism. But occasional fantasy elements – a hallucinatory premonition; the ghostly but benign visitations of dead prisoner – merge seamlessly into the larger picture.

In the central role of Malik, newcomer Tahar Rahim is a revelation. He’s present in every scene and carries the weight of the full 150 minute running time. Initially, he’s a fearful loner, surviving on animal instincts alone. But as he endures each ordeal, Malik begins to take shape and fill the film. Originally happy just to survive from day to day, Malik begins to thrive, seeing in prison a chance for the education that has so manifestly failed him in his life before. But this is the kind of vocational training that doesn’t lead to a 9 to 5 job. Malik learns to read and write, but he also covertly teaches himself Corsican, the better to ingratiate himself further with the formidable gang who rule the prison. The threats to his life, present in every sidelong glance from friends or foes alike, gather as Malik juggles his allegiances to the Corsican gang, his overtures to the growing Muslim prison contingent and the ambitious drug-running business he masterminds from behind bars.

The ruthless, testosterone-soaked, dog eat dog world is captured with a cold-eyed clarity and a total lack of sensationalism. Audiard’s occasional stylistic flourishes, like the sound design which evokes the roar of blood pumping in Malik’s ears after he is temporarily deafened by gunshots, only serve to draw the audience further into Malik’s mesmerising journey through the criminal underworld.

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