Forget blue-skinned cowboys and Indians — the movie of the decade so far is A Prophet, Jacques Audiard’s 150-minute masterpiece about the rise of a young con through the ranks of a tungsten-tough French prison. The winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, it foregrounds France’s Arab community in the central character of Malik (Tahar Rahim), whose loyalties are divided between the Muslim prisoners and a dominant group of Corsicans.
The Gallic Scorsese? Audiard’s previous films, Read My Lips and The Beat that My Heart Skipped (an adaptation of the Harvey Keitel flick Fingers) evoked early Scorsese flicks such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, with Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris respectively playing gauche yet charismatic protagonists in the mould of a young De Niro or Keitel. A Prophet is Audiard’s Goodfellas, a sprawling epic charting the criminal evolution of a young hood over years, with a vivid feel for the companionship and hierarchies of thugs.
Leading light The 28-year-old newcomer Rahim becomes Audiard’s latest intense young leading man, his callow features belying a steely magnetism. He appears next in Kevin Macdonald’s Roman drama The Eagle of the Ninth.
Virtuoso violence Like Coppola and Scorsese, Audiard is a director bent on making his maiming memorable. Two scenes in A Prophet — one featuring a razorblade, the second a spoon — are right up there with the pen scene in The Godfather and the car-boot stabbing in Goodfellas.
A potent patriarch Overcoming the handicap of resembling a silver-haired Antony Worrall Thompson, Niels Arestrup makes a lasting impact as C?sar Luciani, the irascible Corsican kingpin who (up to a point) accepts Malik into his inner circle. Arestrup is an Audiard favourite, having played the hero’s father in The Beat that My Heart Skipped.
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The write stuff The screenplay for A Prophet was co-written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, who co-authored Mesrine, with Cassel as the real-life crime lord Jacques Mesrine. The director’s father, Michel Audiard, was a major figure in French crime cinema, writing more than 100 film scripts, including the classic thriller The Big Snatch (1963) with Jean Gabin as an ageing kingpin fresh out of prison, who recruits a young cellmate (Alain Delon) to rob a casino. Audiard Jr, a graduate of the Sorbonne, has a more cerebral take on the crime genre than his dad, alternating stark realism with fantastical interludes.
Slanging match Like La Haine (1995), the film features verlan, a street slang common in the outskirts of French cities, in which the syllables of words are swapped around — “femme” becomes “meuf” and “arabe” becomes “beur”. Verlan originated in the 19th century as a secret language used by youths and criminals to befuddle authority figures. Some verlan words now feature in French dictionaries.
A Prophet (18) is on general release from Friday