A young Arab
odyssey trough prison life.
With “A
prophet” the French writer/director, Jacques Audiard, successfully created an Arab
equivalent to the “Godfather”. He smartly noticed that the numerous Arab French
population, mainly of Algerian descent, was missing any iconic figures and so
he set out to create “images for people who don't have images in movies”.
This is the
main point of the whole movie, get a familiar genre, the prison movie, and give
it a different centre. He underscore this difference by adding the figure of
Corsican crime boss Cesar Luciani, played by Niels Arestup, who represent both
a fading world order and a reminder of what could eventually happen to our
protagonist.
Prison life
is depicted with a brutal, unflinching eye, the scene with the razor will
certainly remain with you for a very long time, but I don’t want to give the
wrong impression, there’s no gratuitous violence, the camera doesn’t linger on
the blood but to do a proper picture on that kind of life you can’t gloss over
it either.
This is an
extremely well written movie, the kind of interesting stuff that’s worth a
movie club evening with added discussion, a masterpiece.
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