When the movies abandoned the moral context in which they
once represented crime and criminals — even when the morality
was inverted for political reasons and the bad guys became good
guys and the good guys bad — they found that they had nothing to
put in its place but a kind of voyeurism. Even the best crime
dramas today, like The Wire, appear to me to invite us
to an aesthetic admiration of wickedness rather than any serious
moral disapprobation of it. Crime is no longer a dreadful
aberration in a basically wholesome social order. Instead it is
taken for granted as being endemic in or even at the very
foundation of that order. There is no longer any “good place”
threatened by criminal invasion; the criminals are already inside
the gates and living next door to us, like the next-door-neighbor
serial killer in
Disturbia. I make no secret of the fact
that, generally, I find such movie representations of criminality
boring at best and offensive and disgusting at worst, but I also
recognize when superior examples of the genre turn up, as they do
in Jacques Audiard’s much-praised French film, Un
Prophete.
The movie tells the story of Malik El Djebena (Tahar
Rahim), a young, French-speaking Arab jailed for assault on a
police officer. The story begins with the rituals of
incarceration, including a strip search that foreshadows the
larger portrayal of life inside this French prison as a Hobbesian
state of nature. Malik, we learn, left school at eleven, unable
to read, and has since spent most of his life in juvenile
custody. Now he has been sentenced to three years as an adult,
though he is not yet out of his teens. The initiation into prison
reality of this youthful innocent comes when César Luciani (Niels
Arestrup), the leader of the prison’s powerful Corsican gang,
orders him to kill a fellow Arab prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem
Yacoubi), who has agreed to testify against one of César’s
criminal contacts on the outside. “Either you kill him, or we
will kill you,” as he puts it to the terrified youth.
Reyeb has made a homosexual pass at Malik, who is ordered
to agree to an assignation and go to it with a razor blade
secreted in his mouth. He practices with another of the Corsicans
who is rather frighteningly experienced at keeping a blade in his
mouth and producing it at a moment’s notice. The scene in which
the ensuing murder takes place is one whose horror is likely to
make it a classic among connoisseurs of graphic violence in the
movies and first makes clear the film’s voyeuristic intentions —
not only with respect to the murder itself but also in terms of
the murderer’s horror at his own deed. This is just one example
of the film’s juxtaposition of the ruthlessness with which a
prison-based crime empire is built up with the youth and
innocence of the hero — who himself is soon the one doing the
building. It’s the same technique used by Graham Greene in
Brighton Rock and, though it is not as political as
Greene, it similarly serves as a reproach to “society,” as it
seems to confirm that criminals are made by social injustices and
brutalities and not by free choice.
Greene, writing 70-odd years ago, used his 17-year-old
criminal hero’s incongruous Catholic faith to win a measure of
sympathy for him. M. Audiard tentatively offers up Malik’s
Islamic faith for the same purpose. We see him learning to read
in prison under the tutelage of his one friend, Ryad (Adel
Bencherif), and learning from him the tenets of his ancestors’
religion, about which he is otherwise mostly ignorant. Viewers
are meant, I think, to find this touching, even inspirational,
like another scene in which Malik flies on an airplane for the
first time, even though his growth in wisdom and experience is
all in the service of his advancement as a criminal. His
innocence is also connected with the dreams which at times appear
to give him the power to predict the future — the reason for a
question from another criminal confederate (Slimane Dazi) as to
whether he is a prophet or something and thus for the title of
the film.
For a while early on it seems as if the ruthless César is
going to steal the movie from Malik, and Mr. Arestrup’s
performance remains one of its highlights. As it is a picture
about a sort of amoral, Nietzschean wickedness and ruthlessness,
César sums up these qualities even better than Malik does. But
soon, as is not unexpected, the pupil is surpassing the master.
During his days as a lowly servant of the other gang members,
Malik learns from César how the power in prison is won and
distributed. “When people look at you, they see me. If not, what
do they see? Nothing.” But even at that point we are aware, as
César is not, that Malik has already figured this out — and
more, that he has figured out that the older man’s power is
waning as his is growing.
That’s why criticism of the film for “racism” misses the
point. Racism is a term that only means anything in the world
outside, the world of civil society. In the prison something much
more elemental is going on that is only tangentially related to
race. As Mr. Audiard makes clear, you can’t survive inside
without protection and you can’t get protection unless you are a
member of one gang or another. Malik, though an Arab, is a member
of the Corsican gang because, at the beginning it is more
powerful than any other. “We run this place,” they tell him, and
he believes them. Why shouldn’t he? But he’s also smart enough to
know that the Corsicans are weakening, partly because of
politics. President Sarkozy (mentioned by name) has decreed that
some of the Corsicans will serve their sentences out closer to
home. This leaves César’s gang badly depleted and unable to
enforce their will on others.
Sure, the Corsicans are casual racists, calling Malik
“Dirty Arab” and “not one of us,” and they make him do their scut
work — not to mention the murder. But Malik takes all this in
his stride and without resentment, as part of the duty of the
weak to the strong in a savage state. When César asks him to find
out what the other Arabs in the prison are thinking, he says: “Do
you want me to get beat up? To them I’m a Corsican” Malik has a
cool head. That’s the point of him. He knows how and when to ally
himself with the strong, make himself useful (indeed,
indispensable) to them and then jump to the soon-to-be stronger
Arab gang at the right moment. As he tells Ryad at one point, we
need to be on their side now. The time for revenge comes
later.”
Like Tony Soprano or Don Corleone, that is, Malik is
supposed to be admirable for his ability to survive and finally
thrive in a criminal environment that is the only life he knows.
But unlike the Sicilians, neither he nor the Corsicans are
depicted as belonging to a well-established honor culture which
exists outside the prison, as well as inside, and independently
of it. This I believe to be a weakness in the film, since it
means that our view of the hero is almost as circumscribed as his
own. He has no milieu but that of the prison, and this creates a
barrier between him and us — unless, I suppose, we are prisoners
too. This flaw is another consequence of the movies’ jettisoning
of moral context. Just as individuals make up their morality as
they go along, so do societies. This cuts them off from each
other, and from us, even though both owe more to tradition and
precedent and the larger culture of which we are all a part than
they care to admit. Putting in more of those connections would
have made this a better movie.
