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On DVD: The French Crime-Epic Import of the Year

Because crime in reality is something like a perpetual butterfly effect, kicking off cause-effect chains in every direction at once, modern crime movies are best and truest when they're epic, and of course, the best of them are, from Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge to The Godfather to GoodFellas to Michael Mann's Heat. A new French import (and Oscar-nominee) A Prophet takes on the hefty requirements, weighing at over 2.5 hours and hitting the ground in ultra-real style that leaves little to the imagination in terms of bottom-feeding smells, filth, violence and cold fear.

Director Jacques Audiard's previous film, 2005's The Beat My Heart Skipped, was a tame and too-cool redo of James Toback's hyperventilating '70s indie Fingers. But A Prophet rises above mannerism and wannabe co-optation, finds its own vocabulary, and becomes a defining experience. After seeing it, you feel as if you've been morally compromised yourself, and you can't shake the queasiness.

No background required, we hit the entry interview with Malik (Tahar Rahim), an Arab-born orphaned 20-something convicted of theft, and get pushed into the prison system along with him. Initially a blank slate, because he's not letting anything show, Malik tries to keep to himself in the yard and in the showers -- but can't. Almost immediately, a snitch passing through the prison hits him up for a blow job, and then the Corsican crime boss (Niels Arestrup) who owns the guards tells Malik that he'll have to kill the snitch or die himself.

This is no tough-guy genre scenario. The realism sets your teeth on edge, and Malik's stomach-shredding anxiety is palpable. Once the assassination is managed, in a panicked struggle and with a hard-won jet of throat blood that makes every torture-porn bit of gore you've ever seen look absurd by comparison, Malik's problems only begin. Stuck between the growing number of Muslim Arab convicts and the Corsican mob, Malik slowly begins to see his own way, using the prejudices and desires of both factions to begin building his own dope cartel.

In many ways it's a classic prison film, and could've been made anywhere, except for the particularities of the French system -- not only do the cons get fresh bread delivered to their private cells every day, but you can get day-long furloughs for good behavior. It's with Malik's furloughs, sponsored by the Corsican, that the film blooms, revealing the vast intersections between inside and outside, and introducing new characters and criminal plots as the web of influence and impact grows with Malik's ambition. Of course the more complex and more blood-strewn the connections get, the more we fear Malik may well be in over his head.

Audiard's movie isn't just a crook procedural -- it's loaded with subjective asides and raw poetry, from dreamy memory swatches to the calm presence of the dead snitch, sometimes on fire, as Malik's more or less permanent bunkmate. A Prophet also builds like a bolero, from the tale of one lonely Arab to the story of over a dozen fated lowlifes from three or four rival gangs struggling up the pile, and you're hit with enough story for two films.

Audiard clearly saw fidelity as his priority, and everyone's believable in the way French movies are best at. While Arestrup is titanically menacing as the ice-eyed kingpin, Rahim really owns the movie, and every wary shift of his eyes takes us with it. It could almost be a silent picture, so much is internalized and expressed through action. Audiard's film made ripples across Europe, and yanked in scores of awards; released here in February, it seems to have never received an unenthusiastic review. Watch for it on critics' lists in December.