If you like your crime movies intelligent and in close contact with reality then Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is as good as it gets. As the Times crime editor, my business is criminals and cops, and a side-effect of the occupation is that watching the vast majority of crime dramas and films can be a frustrating experience. I groan at the preposterous plots of Waking the Dead, despair at the whimsical New Tricks and gape at the gimmicks employed by the CSI team.
Cinema has not been much better over the past decade. The formula of ending the pursuit of the serial killer in the home of the hero or heroine, when the hero or heroine’s spouse or children are alone, has been thoroughly exhausted.
The problem is credibility. Somewhere along the line the genre lost touch with the reality of crime. Then came The Wire, television’s most intelligent and accurate portrayal of organised crime, the politics of policing, and the social ills that lie behind gang and drugs culture.
HBO’s masterpiece seems to be having an impact on European film-makers. Last year the Italian director Matteo Garrone delivered Gomorrah, a grim depiction of the impact of organised crime in Naples on the lives of those embroiled in criminality and those ruined by it. France has produced Mesrine, the excellent biopic of the 1970s Parisian gangster Jacques Mesrine, and now there is A Prophet, which can genuinely claim to be regarded as an epic crime movie.
Audiard depicts the criminal education of Malik El Djebena, jailed for six years at the age of 19 and forced to negotiate his survival in a harsh French prison. The violence is brutal, but matter of fact — part of the routine of getting by and getting on in a cold, dirty, dangerous jail.
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A Prophet dispenses with the notion of the gangster as an adherent to a criminal code of honour. Instead we are treated to the amoral world of today’s criminal gangs in which alliances are readily brokered and easily broken in pursuit of profit, power and reputation.
Tahar Rahim, who plays Malik, features in almost every scene, growing from a terrified teenager on his first night in prison into an accomplished operator whose swagger and stature fill the screen.
Finally, after almost 40 years, we have a gangster film that makes The Godfather look dated. Alongside Audiard’s ruthless characters, the Corleone family appear as relics from some distant, romantic age. And to give himself the opportunity to really leave Coppola’s trilogy in the shade, the Frenchman has cleverly left the door open to a sequel.
A Prophet is released on Friday