The Multicultural Empire of Crime
Tahir Rahim in A Prophet
In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack. The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big Lebowski). Gilmore’s “Mack the Knife,” with its mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, is a nice emblem for Audiard’s film, which is able to refresh some of the most conventional aspects of the American gangster film—the improbable rise to power, the double-cross, the camaraderie amongst criminals, and of course, the charismatic anti-hero—by relocating them to contemporary multicultural France.
The film follows the survival, education, and triumph of one Malik El Djebena (played with understated aplomb by Tahir Rahim), a young man we meet at the beginning of the film on the first day of his new life in the French penal system. His crime is vaguely defined and like everyone else in jail, he proclaims his innocence. The rest of Malik is equally inchoate. He doesn’t know his parents and has no connections in the outside world. He can’t read or write. He’s Arab, but when asked what language he learned to speak first, French or Arabic, he answers, “Both.” In response to questions about his religion at the beginning of the film, Malik is similarly divided. When a prison guard asks him if he has dietary restrictions, Malik appears not to understand the question. When the guard simplifies it to “Do you eat pork?” Malik first answers “No” and then hesitantly “Yes.”
In Mike Judge’s Office Space, we learned that in order to survive in prison you either have to kick someone’s ass or become someone’s bitch. To play it safe, Malik does both. The Corsican mafia that dominates the other inmates with the help of the corrupt prison guards is ordered by its home office to liquidate a new prisoner and underworld rival due to inform at a trial within weeks. Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), the informant, is Arab and gay. Malik is handsome and conveniently located on his cellblock for temporary stays and new entries. For these reasons and because they prefer not to risk one of their own for the mission, the Corsicans, led by their diminutive, Napoleonic elder statesman Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), decide that Malik will do the killing for them. The short story of Reyeb’s assassination is a cinematic tour-de-force. Malik is in way over his head, and thanks to Audiard’s visceral direction, so too are we the viewers. In the yard when the proposition is made to him, his fear is unrefined. He shakes and shifts his eyes unsteadily amongst his “protectors,” especially as he’s warned that any attempt to shirk responsibility will result in his death rather than Reyeb’s. Foolishly, he tries to back out anyway. But rather than meeting with the warden per his request, the Corsicans visit his cell to remind him of the extent of their power with a mock execution.
What follows is the beginning of Malik’s education. Getting to justly suspicious Reyeb will not be easy. Malik must learn to put a razor blade in his mouth and act natural; then call it forth into his teeth at a second’s notice to slash his target’s throat. It is one of cinematic murder’s more athletic forms. Malik’s training sessions, in which he first pretends to stimulate his instructor’s genitals and then leaps up and puts the blade to his throat, are thorough and he practices diligently, but he lacks talent. In the event, he’s shaking with fear and adrenaline, which Reyeb seems to mistake for nervousness about their impending sexual encounter. But when Malik realizes blood is dripping from the side of his mouth that contains the razor, he gives up waiting for his victim to enter a more vulnerable state. The struggle that ensues between them is contained by the film, but just barely. The murder is a chaotic masterpiece and the audience is more witness than spectator. The scene recalls the realisms of Hollywood’s greatest contemporary purveyor of violence, Paul Greengrass, and its greatest critic, Michael Haneke. But Audiard manages to surpass them both: not so much in the way the event is depicted, though arguably there too, but in the way it inflects the rest of the film. In dreams, in waking life, Reyeb obstinately haunts Malik’s coming-of-age. The idea that murder afflicts the murderer’s conscience is one of the least represented in all of cinema. Just before Malik offs him, Reyeb encourages Malik learn to read while in prison. After he learns that his deed has earned him Corsican protection, the first thing Malik does is enroll in the prison’s language arts class.
That Malik’s journey from anonymity to the French equivalent of Michael Corleone is improbable is an accepted convention of the film’s genre. But advances in the complexity of crime and police procedural genre television, such as The Sopranos and The Wire, are beginning to make the arc of cinematic storylines like A Prophet’s seem strained. On The Wire, for instance, there is no need for one character to remain in an impossible state of grace while the criminal world explodes around him. If it is logical or probable that a lead character should meet his demise, the show has plenty of other plot lines to follow through on, given its multivalent narrative structure. Audiard’s genius in A Prophet, however, resides not in apologizing for the improbability of his hero, but in the way he magnifies the unlikelihood of Malik’s success. It is literally a divine circumstance. Malik is a prophet (and a Muslim one at that). He has visions of the future and a guardian angel in the form of Reyeb’s ghost. He undergoes a spiritual transformation while in solitary confinement for forty days and forty nights. In the final battle sequence, his opponents’ bullets travel in slow motion while he playfully hides under a corpse. Perhaps most notably, at the moment when Reyeb’s criminal partner deduces Malik’s part in his friend’s murder, Audiard resorts to a kind of secular deus ex machina. Their car strikes an antelope that Malik has seen in a dream, at which point his enemies begin to believe.
But the real miracle of the film is the care that goes into its moving parts. The camera work is often astonishing. The film score is moving but unobtrusively atmospheric. Reyeb’s intermittent and surreal presence is a distant allusion to the work of David Lynch; but rather than terrorizing Malik, Reyeb’s ghost adds depth to Malik’s character. He is living for them both now. Audiard uses surrealism to do the most difficult thing in storytelling: to show the inner life of his hero rather than merely recite it. But above all, the film is carried by its actors. Tahar Rahim plays Malik with an awkward grace best exemplified by the strange boyish mustache he wears for most of the movie. It is the one part about him that is equally French and Arab. But it is Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciani, Malik’s protector, mentor and archenemy, with his virtuosic oscillations between unflappable calm and rage, who supports the film where it otherwise lacks foundation. At each step in Malik’s journey toward criminal mastery, Cesar is there to remind him, quite violently in fact, who it is that guarantees his existence. And yet with each one of these tirades one notices the emperor’s robes looking a little more threadbare. Of course it doesn’t help that the Corsicans’ numbers in the prison are dwindling while the Arab population swells.
One scene in particular is a testament to both actors, but particularly Arestrup. With the help of a recently released friend and another who is an experienced hash dealer on the inside, Malik has been using part of the release time Cesar bought for him to begin smuggling hash into the prison and controlling its distribution. Then in an instance of what business professors call “the curse of competitive markets,” rival hash dealers are angered by the newcomers and kidnap Malik’s closest friend, Ryad (Abel Bencherif). Malik responds by kidnapping the rival gang leader’s mother and ambushing his brother inside the prison. When the hostage exchange is made and Malik is riding high on his success, he has the misfortune to happen upon his old boss, who has recently gotten wind of Malik’s new, independent operations. With a cup of coffee and a fatherly curiosity Cesar masterfully draws out Malik, who is only too happy to confess his recent accomplishments. Then Cesar shows why he needs anger management courses. From across the table, he seizes Malik by the neck and forces the spoon he had been harmlessly cleaning with his tongue under his protégé’s eyelid, all while explaining to him that he has risked losing his leave days that Cesar counts on to negotiate his business affairs in Marseilles by proxy. After this interview Malik never lets his guard down again. Cesar’s final lesson serves his pupil only too well.
“Mack the Knife” has perhaps the most unlikely history of any American pop-song of its era. In 1958, more than two decades of The Threepenny Opera premiered and a little over a decade after Brecht improbably cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee despite being blacklisted anyway, Bobby Darrin rode the “communist” murder ballad to the top of the Billboard charts and a Grammy Award at the height of the Cold War. Similarly, if the quality of a film is any indication of its box-office potential, then Malik, a Muslim gangster who weakens the Corsican mafia while consolidating Arab organized-crime, is destined to endear himself to audiences on the opposite side of “The War on Terror.” But then again, cultural differences aside, Americans have always loved a good criminal.
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