ON LIFE'S TERMS
by Howard Schumann
A
19-year-old man of North African origin is sentenced to six years in
prison for assaulting a police officer. When he enters prison, he is
naïve, shy, and almost withdrawn, and cannot read or write. When
he leaves six years later, he has become a self possessed, educated
individual, capable of controlling his own destiny as well as that of
others. Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet,
winner of the Grand Prix Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is
an engrossing coming-of-age drama set in a French prison in which Malik
el Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a Muslim estranged from his own community,
is recruited into the ruling Corsican Mafia and eventually becomes a
gang leader himself. Though deeply involved in nefarious and often bloody
activities, the genuineness of his personality makes him an appealing
and sympathetic character and adds depth to a riveting experience.
Based
on a story by screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri, the film clocks in at
a lengthy 150 minutes but never feels padded or stretched out. Unable
to film in an actual prison location (because they were all being used),
Audiard had his own prison built in an industrial area of Paris. As
he explains, “Watching it take shape helped us build the prison
in our minds, as well." When Malik first arrives, he is singled
out by Corsican Mafia boss César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and
told to kill fellow Muslim prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) by slitting
his throat with a razor blade. If he refuses, he will be killed himself.
Once the job is done, in as brutal a scene as you will ever witness,
Malik is put under César’s protection, becoming the Corsican’s
Arab who carries out menial tasks for him inside the prison.
Beset
by visions of the deceased Reyeb, Malik, however, soon begins to educate
himself on many levels, not only learning to read, but teaching himself
Corsican and learning details of Luciani’s business. More importantly
for his survival, he learns how to operate among the various prison
subcultures with their various rituals and codes of honor, though he
is still an outsider, not fully trusted by either group.
There is no shortage in the film of details involving drug traffic,
sex, payoffs, and general prison corruption--things we have seen before,
yet the level of our personal involvement remains high due to the 
heart-pounding
set pieces and the compelling performances of the lead actors. Slowly,
César raises the level of jobs given to Malik, affording him
the opportunity to leave the confinement of the prison on several day
passes, one involving his first ever flight to Marseilles to negotiate
with another Mafia kingpin. Little by little, Malik sets up his own
enterprises with his friend Ryad (Adel Bencherif) who is suffering from
cancer, and begins to establish his independence from the Corsicans.
He becomes known as a prophet when he survives a bizarre car crash,
an incident that has been foretold in a fantasy sequence.
Supported
by a compelling original score by Alexandre Desplat and brilliant cinematography
by Stéphane Fontaine, A Prophet is violent, often ugly
and difficult to watch, but is redeemed by the quality of the direction,
the outstanding performances by Rahim and Arestrup, and the honesty
in which it handles the conflicts among ethnic groups, conflicts that
mirror French society as a whole. Tahar Rahim is little more than a
cipher at the beginning, yet acquires considerable strength of character
by the end of the film. According to Audiard, "When I looked into
his eyes there was no melancholy, no tragedy, just someone very open,
very light, very full of life." A mixture of gritty reality, flights
of fancy, identity exploration, and psychological character study, A
Prophet is one of the best films of the year.
*
No
film conveys the innocence of childhood and its passage more poignantly
than Letter to a Child, Vlado Skafar’s
beautiful meditation on the essence of life. The film, chosen by Olaf
Möller of Film Comment magazine as one of the ten best
of 2008, is now in its first ever North American release and was shown
at a Vancouver International Film Festival pre-screening. Letter
to a Child is a series of heartfelt monologues prompted by the
director’s searching questions to a group of young children, teenagers,
young adults, parents, an elderly couple, and an old man in a village
in Slovenia. The second feature by Skafar, who co-founded the Slovenian
Cinematheque and began the Isola Cinema Film Festival in 2004, has no
plot, no narrative thread, no beginning, and no end.
Skafar
simply brought a small camera crew to ask the townspeople questions
about their ideas on things that are important in their lives –
their love for family, the joys they share, their sorrows, and their
views on death and the hereafter. The result is a cinematic testament
to the adventure of life and the beauty of love. Children and teenagers
talk about what is important in their world – friendships, adventures,
and romance – these are ordinary people who have the courage to
look at their lives and reveal what works and what does not. Adults
of course have different concerns, and the joys and heartbreaks of raising
children are articulated with deep insight and awareness and without
self consciousness. In many instances, their silences are more eloquent
than words.
The profundity
of Letter to a Child does not come from pre-conceived ideas
but simply unfolds from the testimony of honest and engaged people who
have known joy and sadness and all the stages in between. Interspersed
with the interviews are glimpses of the director’s own childhood
displayed through personal letters, home videos, and photos from family
albums showing “the passage of time - the eternal cycle of life.”
Letter to a Child is a simple film on the surface, but penetrates
to the deepest parts of human experience to record a poetic chronicle
of life.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
