Director Jacques Audiard has said that the character of Malik, the turbulent moral center of A Prophet, is not, as the title implies, the voice of God, but a simple messenger, "a prototype of a new kind of human being." A juvenile offender transferred to an adult prison on his 19th birthday to serve out the remaining six years of his sentence, Malik (Tahar Rahim) bears both good and bad news, and it breaks over Audiard's two-and-a-half hour chronicle of his coming of age within the French penal system. The central question of the prison drama -- What does it mean to survive? -- is transposed onto the experiences of a young Arab who arrives formless and frightened but increasingly determined to get by. Audiard's new kind of human being is not a mutation or a psychopath but a ruthless adaptor, and the process is one of dubious and paradoxical rewards.
Malik's education is swift: after being robbed of his sneakers on his first yard outing, he is summoned by the leader of the prison's Corsican stronghold, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and forced to choose between his own life and that of a fellow Arab named Reyeb (Hichem Yacboubi). Malik, as we learn during his intake, has no one outside; with this murder he will gain protection, if not community, on the inside. "The idea is to leave here a little smarter," Reyeb says, moments before Malik leaps at his neck with a razor in his mouth. The sequence is ragged and horrific, powered by the probing hand-held camera work that gives much of the film its intimate urgency. In the aftermath Malik learns quickly of the prison's brutal gift economy: cigarettes, someone's life, and wild boar pate are more or less interchangeable. Under the protection of the Corsicans he is also isolated from the prison's Arabs -- different ethnic groups co-exist only through a policy of mutual exclusion.
Targeted by the Corsicans because they can't risk "one of their own," Malik is always in between, and learns to manage his position by cross-breeding his interests. "I'm being rehabilitated," his friend Ryad (Adel Bencherif) insists while teaching Malik to read and write, and it's a line Malik will repeat, like the model student he turns out to be. Learning Corsican alone in his cell at night we finally see signs of an independent psyche; treated like a dog by his protectors, Malik plays to that designation's strengths, winning César's trust with his mute obedience and abject loyalty. Stealthily setting up his own network between cell blocks and facilitating a drug ring, Malik fancies himself a junior diplomat, a mini-mogul, an impression only solidified when he is granted a leave day due to "good behavior," and is able to conduct some serious business on the streets of Paris.
There is an uneasy tension at work between Audiard's (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) indelible style and the teetering paradox of his burgeoning gangster's rise. Contrasting a cold-eyed naturalism with calm, almost soothing hallucinations of his victim and impressionistic internalizations (an iris is used to suggest both the focus and blurring of Malik's attention), Audiard creates a seductive psychology -- and a deep sympathy -- frankly at odds with his hero's journey. Cued to exhilarate in Malik's progress (often by Scorsese-ian music montage) and fear for his safety at the mercy of the almost mythically powerful César, any hope of a spiritual education slips through the frames, his moral fabric proved to be as permeable as the prison walls. A bleak message indeed, and one that could have used a deeper engagement with the film's racial and religious undertones. As it is Audiard uses them much as Malik does -- as a means to an end.
Although the plot reaches a viscosity that challenges digestion -- Malik's ultimate heist is a cloud of new characters and ecstatic violence -- the denouement finds a note of lucid pathos in the film's greatest strength, its lead performers. Newcomer Rahim and Arestrup build a complex, volatile bond, clearly the definitive relationship of Malik's life, that anchors a genre-driven film with human frailty. The final lines of a less successful recent genre exercise, Shutter Island, came to mind as Malik walked out of the last frame of A Prophet, literally trailed by the legacy of who he had become: "Which would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?" Audiard and his impressive but often inscrutable effort pose a follow-up: Is it worse to leave that question unanswered or unexamined?