A prison tale that transcends boundaries

Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a French Arab who's been in and out of jail and juvenile institutions since he was a kid, has just been sent to prison for a six-year sentence.

He's 19 now. Still a kid.

But not for long.

In Jacques Audiard's extraordinarily powerful A Prophet (Un prophète) - a Cannes festival winner and foreign-language Oscar nominee - Malik enters the dark, medieval-looking penitentiary without friends or allies, without knowing how to read or write, and, after a mugging, without his sneakers, either.

Malik's rise becomes a daunting odyssey through the ruling order behind bars, where an old Corsican, Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), controls the black market (and, it seems, the warden and guards), and where a group of Muslims tend to their respective criminal affairs.

At first Malik appears lost, incapable of standing up to the brutal intimidations. And then Luciani takes him under his wing - or puts him under his thumb. He's given a mission: to kill a prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), before he's released to testify at a trial. Make it look like suicide. Do this and you'll be protected.

For Malik, it's kill or be killed. Audiard, a formidable filmmaker (Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, his remake of James Toback's Fingers), brings the audience into the quaking young convict's surreal world. There's a tough sequence in which the camera closes in on Malik as he practices concealing a razor blade in his mouth and flipping it with his tongue to bring it to the ready. He goes at it with desperate resolve; he has no choice.

It isn't a spoiler to note that the killing takes place: Reyeb, a courtly figure with a penchant for hashish, nonetheless appears and reappears, a manifestation of Malik's remorse, but also a spiritual mentor, a muse. These scenes and others, which seem to have sprung from a dream, give The Prophet a haunting and poetic resonance.

As the years pass, Malik is allowed to take daylong furloughs. He starts by working for Luciani, taking care of business on the outside. But then Malik makes arrangements to establish his own network to deal drugs. There are rival gangs to negotiate with, threats and intimidation, a deadly shoot-out in a tony Paris neighborhood.

A Prophet is a prison drama, to be sure, but it transcends all boundaries. Steeped in a world of uncompromising violence, the film is a study of conscience and consequences, power and survival, and the schism - racial and cultural - among Westerners, Arabs, and Africans that is upending the social order of modern Europe.

Rahim, with only a few film and TV roles behind him, gives a performance of startling force and subtlety. Watch the actor's eyes as he interacts with the don, or as his character learns to read, then learns Corsican on the sly, or the look on his face - that otherworldly smile! - when he emerges from a mad scrum of headlocks and gunfire.

If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in The Godfather saga, well . . . he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous.EndText