A Prophet (Un prophète - 2009)

Jack and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of France's Oscar nominee for last year (it didn't win). Extremely long, extremely violent, yet strangely mesmerizing, this coming-of-age story with a twist (it takes place almost entirely in a prison) kept us engaged for most of its 144 minutes. I was a big fan of director/co-writer Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres - 2001) and this is very good, too. Audiard and Thomas Bidegain started with an existing unproduced script and re-wrote it, which won them one of eight César Awards (the French Academy), and the movie won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes and others. Tahar Rahim, in his first starring role, is a young Frenchman of Algerian descent. His character, Malik, is a non-practicing Muslim, who has to endure the same prejudices the worshipful guys do. It made me think of the promo NPR aired last week for the story about there not being a box on the US Census to check for Iranian. In the clip the comedian said, "They called me camel jockey, towel head, and all I had to say was, 'Dude, I'm white!'" Malik begins his prison term as a 19 year old boy and grows to be a man as he learns to survive the "protection" of the incarcerated Corsican mobsters and their scary boss played by Niels Arestrup (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon - 2007) and others). I didn't get why the movie was called A Prophet; one time someone calls Malik that but it only relates to that scene as far as I could tell. The music is by the prolific Alexandre Desplat (I wrote about him in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Coco Before Chanel, and after those he scored Chéri, Julie & Julia, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and more!) but the most noteworthy songs are Turner Cody's Corner of My Room, which is in the trailer and sounds remarkably like Bob Dylan (listen here), and Jimmie Dale Gilmore's version of Mack The Knife, sounding a bit like Willie Nelson (check it out), over the credits. Like I said, extremely violent, but if you can handle it, you'll be glad you saw it.