“A Prophet”: is it too early to call Film of the Year?

Sometimes movie gets it so right you want grab the screen by its imaginary collars and drag it passionately toward you. For a fleeting, transitory moment, the film is yours and yours alone; it’s coming home with you and everyone else you pass on the way is seething with jealousy. “Too bad. This one is mine,” you smirk rubbing, their noses in it. “You can have it when I’m finished.”

“A Prophet” is that sort of movie: a prison drama bursting at its bloody seams with sublime moments. One in particular spills out onto the cell floor to rise up and shank itself into our memories permanently. Director Jacques Audiard commits a masterstroke of genius by blasting Nas’ “Bridging the Gap” over an electrifying montage of young prisoner Malik rising to power in prison.

Nas’ track does more than highlight Malik’s Machiavellian brilliance: “Old School, new school, no school rules.” Like Nas, Malik largely educates himself. Whether it is secretly learning the language of his Corsican mafia “sponsors” or sitting economic exams to boost his drug dealing business, Malik may not be as legally innocent as Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption,” but he still “had to come to prison to be a crook.”

When Malik first steps foot into prison things are different. His Disney eyes make him look like a puppy in a bag, about to be drowned. He can’t read and write, has no one to send him money and his mixed French/Beur heritage means that gangs disown him while the sharks that swim in the concrete yard prey on him. Malik’s so detached from any culture he can’t even remember if he eats pork or not. When his trainers are robbed early on, we don’t hold up out much hope for this skinny kid surviving his six year stretch.

Audiard’s movie is all about transition, physically, emotionally and spiritually. But Malik’s is a violent reawakening, born in a heart of darkness encased in granite. He’s a classic Audiard protagonist who has to experience severe brutality to unravel his hidden talents. Malik is blackmailed into committing murder for the Corsican mafia, who are thugs hiding behind their nationalism, led by their pocket Napoleon, Cesar.

Broken and bewildered by the raw wound of his incarceration, Malik must comply. We’ve seen prison movies before, we’ve got a good idea what’s going to come, but it was never so artfully observed as this. Malik trains for his hit like a boxer, literally chewing razor blades in a montage that’ll have men dusting off their Victor Kiam Remington’s and women reaching for the Veet. He is relentless, practising over and over just like Thomas Seyr preparing for his piano recital in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.”

Baptised by the arterial spray from his victim, Malik can begin his climb to power over Corsican and Muslim alike. “The idea is to leave here a little smarter,” he’s told, and Malik listens. He listens and watches, underestimated and ridiculed, but never too proud or ignorant to take the best from all cultures and religions as he builds his empire quietly. He’s a metaphor for what France could become under Nicolas Sarkozy, a curious mix of right wing capitalism and left wing multiculturalism.

Malik isn’t the only one who benefits from the added responsibility given to him by Cesar, the film does too. Given day release, Audiard is able to expand Malik’s horizons like a panoramic sunroof casting light on his airtight little world. The opportunities afforded by prison make a mockery of what little formal education he had in school. There is still danger on the outside, a stunning gunfight inside a 4×4 is proof of that, but does Audiard think the life chances of Beurs in France are so narrow that prison becomes an attractive alternative to university?

One thing’s for sure, “A Prophet” is Audiard’s own journey into the light. Like Malik, the director has been biding his time in the shadows, practising his craft, revealing glimpses of his audacious skill over the years, and waiting patiently to deliver his coup de grace. “A Prophet” then not only gets it right, it bridges the gap between brilliant French Auteur and genuine world class filmmaker.

You may already have seen the film of the year.