A Prophet

It's rare for a director to have a 100% strike rate, to never make a film counted as less than "good". There's usually one dud lurking in the filmography. Jacques Audiard, however, falls into this special category, Maybe it's his slow working methods - he produces a film every 3-4 years - but the lack of quantity is compensated by the sheer quality (the split-time converging narratives of See How They Fall, the ironic take on the Resistance myth in A Self-Made Hero, the deaf heroine outsmarting the men in Read My Lips, and best of all, the brilliant reworking of James Toback's Fingers into a totally Gallic thriller) His latest film continues this astonishing run.
A Prophet may be 2 1/2 hours long, graphically violent (a razor blade execution, an almost-eye gouging with a spoon, a shooting inside a car), and male-dominated but it grips from the start, remains breathlessly thrilling and psoitively flies by. A lot of the audience involvement is down to a towering central performance by Tahar Rahim (Audiard always gets the best out of his young male leads) It's not built around acting pyrotechnics but is instead quiet, watchful, thoughtful as befits Malik's trajectory: from fearful newbie to budding crime lord. The key to this rise is education, both the socially-sanctioned variety, and the more dubious criminal kind. When he arrives in prison, he's borderline illiterate. Ironically, it's the initial influence of the man he's forced to kill that pushes him towards the classes run in prison, further strengthened by a fellow Arab, Ryad, who becomes his closest friend. Language is likewise a powerful force in the film. Malik speaks both French and Arabic, already giving him an advantage over the ruling Corsican gang. He proves a quick study and the years of being a lackey for the Corsicans enables him to pick up their language too, which he cannily doesn't reveal. As far as they are concerned he's merely one of the despised Arabs. The fact that they don't know any Arabic proves to be vital later on, during a meeting with Malik and Ryad to arrange a hit. Malik's outsider status with both groups becomes an advantage in the hands of a naturally intelligent young man.
The vast majority of the film is grittily realistic as one would expect with the prison milieu, and yet there are surreal interludes with the reappearance of Malik's victim, Reyeb. Rather than being disturbed by these visions, Malik grudgingly tolerates this ghostly intruder and in one scene is amusingly disgusted by the smoke billowing from Reyeb's slashed throat as he smokes a cigarette. Proceedings throughout are punctuated by wry humour (the roll-call of the Corsican gang ending with the very un-Italian "el Djebena" for instance) though it's a fair distance into the film before we actually see Malik himself smile - and when we do it's a wonderful moment, as the audience realizes it wants to see that smile again. And we do: it's there when Malik takes his first plane journey and gazes at the clouds, and as he plays with Ryad's baby. Even as Malik becomes more ruthless, he never quite loses a certain innocence and vulnerability. It's there in the expression on his face while on the plane, the way he interacts with Rayd's family and how he's rather stay on the beach, gazing at the ocean instead of visiting a prostitute. A dangerous man, yes, but there's not really exaltation in his eyes as the now-isolated Cesar, former prison kingpin, is humilated in the prison yard just as Malik had been at the beginning. There might even be a glimmer of compassion for this hated man in that unreadable expression. It's only January but already there's a serious contender for film of the year.