Review By: Gabriel V. Rupp
Review of: A Prophet
By: Jacques Audiard, ( 2009) ( Director)
Psychologist Susan Rowland (2006) has described a way of reading Carl Jung’s collected works: by treating his writing not as a technical, objective report but as literature. Specifically, she approached his texts as examples of the performance of a psyche attempting to come to terms with itself, in short, to individuate, to use Jung’s term.
Rowland said, “Jung portrays a dynamic psyche in action in his writings” (p. 285). Such an approach, she added, is necessarily dialogic; that is, it functions, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1982) described in The Dialogic Imagination, as a kind of conversation between competing voices, with the first voice seeking modernist unification, reflecting the West’s saturation with monotheism, and the second voice a collusion of fragmentary voices, reflecting what could be called the naturally dynamic mind.
With these concepts—Jungian individuation and Bakhtinian dialogics—we approached the remarkable film A Prophet. This film lends itself to this interpretative framework, and its analysis also revealed layers of dialogics at work, in which binary oppositions, such as the social versus the psychological and the unified self versus the crowd of selves, compete with one another and yet never synthesize, never fully realize the naïve promise of modernity’s celebration of the individual as an autonomous, self-realizing agent of positive change.
In the end, the film is what we call a successful failure in that it presents all too accurately the human condition in a world of uncertainty, violence, and suffocating social roles. The success is in the director’s masterful choice of very human actors living out prescribed roles. The failure, we believe, is in current society itself, where underneath the surface of civilization lurks the bestial, the violent.
From the outset, A Prophet invites the viewer into the gritty world of stark oppositions: life versus death, love versus hate, freedom versus incarceration, and strength versus weakness. Even in its horrific imagery, the film plays on the boundaries between extremes, with a consistent though often jerky move between light and shadow. Indeed, the very first images confronting the viewer are dark, partial, nightmaresque.
The main character, Malik El Djebena, played by Tahar Rahim, is initially presented literally in pieces: first, just a voice, then a clenched fist, then a partial body shot revealing a scarred torso, and finally, as the screen brightens, Malik, a French-born Arab, being led through the process of incarceration. He is stripped, questioned, and gradually herded, through sterile and harsh corridors, to the real beginning of his journey: his induction, for crimes more suggested than delineated, into the “modern” prison.
As we watched and rewatched this provocative film, we were consistently struck not only by the oppositions listed above but also by their nondialectical presentation. Specifically, one of the grounding oppositions, good versus evil, is offered less as a thesis versus an antithesis than as a constant set of questions concerning the nature of good and evil.
Bohr’s (1960/1987) principle of complementarity may be apt here: Like the quantum physicist who participates and arguably even cocreates the reality of wave/particle, all oppositions in the film are alternating visions, determined in part by who is observing. And among these alternating visions, the overarching dialogic in play is between the starkly real social and the dreamy psychological. To be true to the movie, we feel that a dual analysis is required, operating on two levels: the social and the psychological.
The Social: Living the Nightmare of Deindividuation in the Group
In approaching the film as a person’s struggle to come to terms with social fitness, we found it to be a lived parable of ingroup/outgroup dynamics, with Malik presenting a dehumanizing deindividuation (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952). In the beginning, Malik attempts to discover and then follow the social norms of the Corsican Mafia family. His first contact with them in prison is harrowing: They wrap a trash bag over his head, threatening him, calling him a dirty Arab, and leaving him huddled on the floor, crying.
Sadly, Corsican and Arab are both the two main rival groups in the prison and the dualistic heritage of Malik himself, as he is an Arab, yet becomes, through perverted and violent rites of passage, a functional Corsican, in the group but never quite of the group. In a more romantic world, one would expect a kindly social worker or thoughtful prison psychologist to be there to help Malik rise above the invitations to join one of the gangs; indeed, throughout the movie there exist seemingly well-intentioned staff members who try to educate Malik and address the issue of rehabilitation.
Yet these characters are always flat, on the margins, and almost perfunctory in their advice. In short, rehabilitation is presented as a child’s fantasy: The real world in this film is a world of adaptation to the prison social environment, and that environment is cruel, rank-ordered, and devoid of any real rehabilitation.
Denied any real possibility of “fitness” as a “good” prisoner, Malik obeys the Corsicans. At their orders, Malik kills a man, an Arab, Reyeb, using the ruse of a trade of sex for drugs, in the most frightening scene in the movie. The killing is beyond messy: Blood spurts and splatters as the two men grapple on the floor. The shaking of the victim in his death throes is mirrored by Malik’s own shaking; he cannot stop shivering after the murder, and he lies on the floor, covered by his own and his victim’s blood.
This scene, like so many in the movie, is neither a Tarantino-esque cartoon of violence nor a slick, film noir realism, but rather something hurtful, disturbing, and inevitable. In order to survive, Malik must act. Following the murder, his status rises, and he is rewarded, tangibly through material resources such as cigarettes and other goodies, and less tangibly, as he becomes the Number One protégé of the Corsicans’ prison boss César Luciani, played masterfully by Niels Arestrup.
The social dynamic complicates, refusing any kind of easy resolution and, for Malik, any kind of simple choice. Specifically, the Muslim/Arab population in prison increases as the Corsicans’ numbers dwindle. Malik is used by and caught between the two groups. When he attempts to set up his own drug trade, he is savaged by César, who tells him, “If you live, you live thanks to me,” adding that even Malik’s “dreams” are owed to the crime boss.
What makes César’s pronouncement ironic is the eventual role reversal Malik effects by the end of the film. On a leave day, after murdering César’s boss’s bodyguard at César’s direction, he leaves the boss himself alive, letting him know César was behind the attempted murder. This act becomes a kind of nightmare-for-a-dream exchange, as Malik becomes a kind of boss for the Arabs. In a strangely sad scene, the Arabs beat César when he attempts to speak with Malik.
The Psychological: Dreaming the Dream of an Individuated Self
Underneath the masterful presentation of social dynamics, visually underscored via naked lightbulb lighting, lurks a subtle yet consistent dream motif. After killing Reyeb at the beginning, Malik is visited by his ghost. In the first sequence, they grapple, yet the grappling seems more homoerotic than violent, and the ghost, smiling, raises a thumb that bursts into flames. Later, in an extended dream sequence, we see through Malik’s eyes a dimly lit prison corridor, down a labyrinth of doors, cells, and barred windows, all shadowy and fragmented.
Then the scene shifts, and the viewer sees, as if looking through a car window, first one deer, then two, then a herd running in front of the car, away from the headlights. The scene shifts again, and partial glimpses of a man’s face emerge, never distinct, never whole. Finally, the dream concludes with the ghost of Reyeb, not angry, standing like a friend or a brother in front of Malik. This dream, the last in the film, ends with Reyeb covered with flames, smiling.
At first, these dreams seem like simple expressions of an inchoate guilt Malik may be experiencing. However, the real meaning of the dream is revealed when Malik, on another day pass from the prison, meets with one of Cesar’s rivals, who happens to be a friend of the murdered Reyeb.
Upon learning that Malik killed Reyeb, the rival prepares to shoot Malik. As they are traveling in a car, Malik, spotting a deer-crossing sign, yells that “animals” are coming, which is prophetic, as the car hits a deer, killing it. The rival, obviously impressed, asks Malik, “What are you?” and then answers his own question, “Aprophet.” It is from this point that Malik is in, though not really of, the rival Muslim group.
The dreaming prophet motif is reiterated in a later scene when Malik is thrown into solitary for 40 days and 40 nights—alone but safe as the prison’s gangs battle. The question remains: not what is Malik but who is Malik? That is, what self is trying to emerge? What identity is behind Malik’s actions? The archetypes are subtle yet discernible. The burning man reflects both Malik’s shadow, and, in his friendliness, the attempt of a self to become aware of its components, accept them, and then become a unique, individuated consciousness.
However, Malik never really does emerge across the course of the film. In all moments, there is something of the clueless and guileless child about him. He certainly acts, but one never gets a sense of a whole person. He adapts to the social, despite its complexity, yet within, we never see a Malik, never know what he feels, and never get a sense that he learns anything but social survival, which is always in a dialogic relation to psychological health.
At the end of the film, the viewer is left with the possibility that Malik, though not yet in focus, could remain that way. In the last scene, upon his release from prison, he agrees to live with a friend’s family and will sleep in the “child’s room.” His friend’s wife, like all of the females in this film, is negligible in the action that has already occurred. Indeed, this film is overtly masculine. In Jungian terminology, crudely stated, it is replete with complex representations of the animus, but the anima, reduced to distant Madonnas or to pornographic sex objects, is significantly absent as either social influence or as a potential aspect of the self for Malik to become aware of and integrate, and thereby facilitate his own self-realization.
Therefore, perhaps the greatest lesson of this film, for both social psychologists, who emphasize the social environment and the “surface” of the human, and the psychodynamic psychologist, who emphasizes the “depth” in the individual, is that each framework, by itself, is incomplete for what Bohr would have called an exhaustive description of human phenomena. Perhaps by framing social influences and psychodynamic processes as an ongoing dialogical process, we, as researchers, teachers, and mental health practitioners, can more fruitfully and accurately approach understanding, treating, and cocreating our fellow humans.
Whatever the case, A Prophet is a must-see film for all. Despite its grittiness, violence, and complexities, it does remind us of an inescapable fact: Human psychology is dependent upon the social, and the social, one must never forget, is also a collective of individual and individuating psyches.
Bakhtin, M. ( 1982). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bohr, N. ( 1987). The unity of human knowledge. In Essays 1958–1962 on atomic physics and human knowledge (pp. 8–16). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press. (Original work published 1960)
Festinger, L., Pepitone, A., & Newcomb, T. ( 1952). Some consequences of de-individuation in a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, 382– 389. doi: 10.1037/h0057906
Rowland, S. ( 2006). Jung, the trickster writer, or what literary research can do for the clinician. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 51, 285– 299. doi: 10.1111/j.0021-8774.2006.00588.x
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Source: PsycCRITIQUES. Vol.55 (33)
Accession Number: 2010-13254-001 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1037/a0020474
Sight & Sound, 2010, 20(2):16-21 By Ginette Vincendeau
A Prophet' is a brutal, uncompromising prison movie with an unknown lead. But Jacques Audiard's fifth film as writer-director is rooted in his earlier, seductive reinventions of the male hero and the French crime genre, argues Ginette Vincendeau
Jacques Audiard's powerful prison drama A Prophet (Un Prophète) seems to have an enchanted life. Since winning the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, the film has gone on to garner more glittering prizes, including Best Foreign Language Film from the US National Board of Review, and the first ever Best Film award at the London Film Festival, where jury director Anjelica Huston lauded it as "a masterpiece, an instant classic and a perfect film". Not surprisingly, it's the French entry for this year's Oscars.
In France A Prophet has been greeted by an unusually consensual chorus of. approval, with barely one dissenting voice (more of which later). It has been praised equally for its stylistic mastery and for raising a rarely tackled yet burning issue: the state of the nation's prisons. Given its lack of major stars, its austere topic and its length (i55 minutes), the film's French box office of 1.2 million admissions is another measure of its wide appeal.
The reception of A Prophet feels like a major vindication for a film-maker who has always privileged quality over quantity - and for a creative process he himself characterises as "blocked, agonising and exhausting". Audiard typically spends up to four years writing and preparing each film, and as a result has directed just five features in 16 years: See How They Fall(Regarde les hommes tomber, 1994), A Self-Made Hero (Un Héros très discret, 1996), Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres, 2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, 2005) and now A Prophet Each film has been unexpected and singular- neither popular genre cinema, nor an auteurist product of the 'Young French Cinema'. Part of an in-betweener generation, Audiard has emerged as a respected but maverick figure- or as Variety put it (in relation to Read My Lips), "an item difficult to position".
Key to this trajectory is his personal history. Born in 1952, Audiard is the son of famous scriptwriter and director Michel Audiard, a lynchpin of post-war popular French cinema of the kind despised by the nouvelle vague. Audiard père wrote truculent dialogue for stars like Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura and Bernard Blier. In interviews Jacques Audiard seems eager to distance himself from the cinema of his father, saying bluntly: "I did not like at all what my father did." However this didn't stop him from starting his career co-writing scripts with his father: genre films such as the Belmondo action movie Le Professionnel (1981) and Claude Miller's psychological thriller Deadly Pursuit (Mortelle randonnée, 1983).
Yet with his directorial debut See How They Falland all the more with his follow-up A Self-Made Hero-Audiard showed he was a distinctive match for his formidable father. Although, as he put it, the nature of their respective engagement with film was fundamentally different ("For him it was a job, as simple as that. He wasn't part of the generation of cinephiles […] whereas I was a cinephile"), there are still clear connections in his work with the professionalism of his father's generation: in particular the technical mastery of his films, their use of memorable male stars, and above all their well-constructed stories.
Audiard's films are tightly plotted, whether in the build-up of 'edge-of-the-seat' suspense (as in Read My Lips) or in their delight in foregrounding the craft of storytelling. A Prophet, for instance, is divided into chapters, while A Self-Made Hero is a masterpiece of self-conscious narration. Its fictional hero Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz) literally invents a past for himself as a Resistance hero during the German Occupation; these carefully crafted and totally invented tales are then collaged with equally fake 'documentaries', television reportage etc.
In its structure and subject, A Self-Made Hero can thus be seen as a laying bare of the art of scriptwriting. It's also typical Audiard in its idiosyncratic reworking of a familiar genre; here it was the Resistance film, but increasingly his films have taken on the French crime-film genre. Though his own avowed cinephile references tend towards American independent cinema of the 1970s (The Beat That My Heart Skipped was a remake of lames Toback's 1978 Fingers), and French critics have gone for comparisons with Scorsese and De Palma, A Prophet places Audiard in a different French genealogy- that of French 'social noir' cinema by the likes of Julien Duvivier and Henri-Georges Clouzot, who harnessed the tone of film noir to explorations of the French social 'lower depths'.
With Read My Lips and The Beat That M V Heart Skipped, the films that really spread his name outside France, Audiard made two strong contributions to a body of recent French neo-noir crime cinema that includes Chaos (2002), Irreversible (2002), 36 (36 Quai des orfevres, 2004) and Le Petit lieutenant (2005). (Television crime series such as Spiral/Engrenages, 2005-8, should be mentioned here too.) But what distinguishes his work from that of his contemporaries is their stronger anchorage in social reality, which harks back more to an earlier social noirtradition. Recently Audiard deplored the fact that "our socio-cultural reality has been ignored by contemporary cinema- the world of work, for instance […] getting up at 6am to go to work in a factory or an office." Through a dominantly blue-grey colour scheme in Read My Lips and a darker, more intense, palette in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Audiard takes the viewer to unfamiliar cinematic territories, the dreary world of office jobs or property developing. Though of course in both cases the world of work is galvanised and eroticised by its encounter with the world of crime - especially as represented by, respectively, Vincent Cassel and Romain Duffs.
At the same time, however, the criminal element goes beyond generic formulae by being embedded in a more minutely observed social reality. Read My Lips addresses office politics and sexual harassment, while The Beat That My Heart Skipped updates the topography and ethnic composition of the Parisian lower depths. A Prophet goes further by focusing on a social world which owes its entire existence to crime: a prison, observed in extraordinary detail. With this film, Audiard aimed for an even higher degree of sociological accuracy. The original screenplay was written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, scriptwriter of the gritty television serial La Commune (2007) as well as the recent two-part feature film Mesrine. Audiard visited prisons, used former inmates as extras and shot the film in a jail painstakingly recreated in a disused factory; he even added ambient sounds recorded in a real prison.
A Prophet was released in France in the summer of 2009, at a moment when President Nicolas Sarkozy and his immigration minister Eric Besson launched a highly tendentious debate on immigration and national identity (and, coincidentally, when celebrity novelist Frédéric Beigbeder drew attention to the positively medieval conditions of the maisons d'arrêts in central Paris in his bestselling autobiography Un Roman français). So Audiard's film seemed bound to spark debate. But interestingly, as with the critical reception, there has been remarkably little controversy over the film's content - even though, for instance, it depicts the prison population as segregated along ethnic lines, between Corsicans and Arabs of North African origin. A Prophet was received with approval across the board: by the minister for justice, by members of the penitentiary administration, by former inmates and by banlieue youths, most of them from North African backgrounds. All agreed that there was some exaggeration in the film - for instance the overt corruption of the prison director and the inmates' ability to carry out murder with impunity - yet approved of it as poetic licence.
At a special screening, prison workers praised the film highly; the director of Nanterre jail concluded, "Finally we have our great film about French prisons." In a banlieue cinema where Audiard discussed the film, the reception was equally positive. A couple of voices did raise the issue of racist stereotyping (Arabs as criminals), but the consensus was summed up by one youth: "I've heard about jail from my mates: it's exactly as in the film." Minister for Urban Affairs Fadela Amara, meanwhile, called A Prophet "the new Scarf ace for the banlieues" - Al Pacino's character in the 1983 Scarface being a cult reference in (male) French banlieue culture.
Nevertheless, Audiard has deplored the sociological slant of these reactions, and denied having made a film 'about jail'- in the same way that he was irritated that Laurent Cantet's The Class (Entre les tours, 2008) gave rise to debates about school. In part this may just be an unwillingness on his part to get drawn into the debate; the issue of race in A Prophet, as in the country at large, is to say the least complex. Audiard's standard reply when questioned about the film's almost exclusive casting of ethnic 'others' (Corsicans, North Africans) is that they are all French- which is both factually accurate and somewhat evasive.
In part Audiard's reaction is the typical position of the French auteur: keen to stake the primacy of artistic vision and style over 'content'. As with Mathieu Kassovitz's banlieue film La Haine in 1995, A Prophet's status as this year's film événement should not obliterate its remarkable stylistic achievements. Audiard's unique tone, which could be described as 'social neo-noir', stems from his bleak vision of a cruel world in which brute force, corruption and violence reign - but also, as in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, from his lyrically dark palette and roving camerawork. Last but not least, the film owes much of its power to the charismatic central performance of its male lead. As Malik, the young petty criminal forced to make his own way in the brutal enclosed world of prison, the unknown Tahar Rahim proves a worthy successor to the stars of Audiard's earlier films.
From See How They Fall to A Prophet, the clearest continuity in Audiard's work lies in his treatment of central male characters. The Audiardian hero is a young male on the margins of society, poised uneasily between two worlds, who works to achieve a kind of redemption by freeing himself from one or several father figures. In some cases these are benevolent (Dehousse's two mentors in A Self-Made Hero and Paul's probation officer in Read My Lips); in some cases they are evil, none as so flamboyantly as the Corsican gang boss César (Niels Arestrup) in A Prophet In some cases there is an actual father-son relationship, as in The Beat That My Heart Skipped (in which Arestrup again was the thuggish father to Romain Duris' would be pianist Thomas). Audiard's heroes follow a double process of apprenticeship: choosing one world over another and freeing themselves from the influence of a father figure. (It's surely no accident that this duplicates Audiard's own trajectory.)
In A Prophet, Audiard inverts the master narrative laid out in A Self-Made Hero. In the earlier film, the hero moved up through the Resistance world in comic mode, thanks to the influence of benevolent father figures- leading to a tragic outcome. In the new one, the hero moves up the prison world, in tragic mode, thanks to his complicated relationship with a monstrous father figure - leading to an optimistic outcome. In A Prophet Malik learns to read while in prison; Audiard's films invariably involve a process of education, which the director compares to the Bildungsroman or, in the case of The Beat That My Heart Skipped, to "the moment [the hero] leaves post-adolescence to become a man". In fact all Audiard's films could just as well be called A Self-Made Hero- which is no doubt the reason he says he prefers that film's English title to the original French.
The world of Audiard's films is intensely male not so unusual in French crime and neo-noir cinema. In this respect A Prophet marks a culmination and possibly a point of no return, prison being the ultimate single-sex microcosm. In virtually the only negative review of A Prophet in France, J.B. Morain in Les Inrockuptibles criticised the brutality and excessive fatalism of the male world presented. More grating in my view is the token female presence: Djamila, the wife of Malik's friend's Ryad, all too readily agrees to be 'rescued' by Malik, along with her son, when her husband dies. Tellingly, Audiard has this to say: "When I see [Malik] leave with the widow and orphan of his friend, I have the weakness of thinking that he will be rather a good father, and a good husband."
There's a notable exception to this male primacy in Read My Lips, which features a female character - Emmanuelle Devos' Carla - whose role is as important as that of the male lead (Vincent Cassel). It is however possibly no accident that Carla is significantly impaired in terms of communication (she's deaf) - just as, in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the young Chinese woman who teaches Thomas the piano hardly speaks French. In other words, if women appear at all in Audiard's films, they are excluded from the circuit of communication between men - and significantly, in a scriptwriter's world, from language.
Perhaps this is about to change. "I have had enough of masculine societies," Audiard told me recently. "I would like to shoot, for instance, a love story. I would like to film women." Of course it is also possible to film women at work, as he himself did in Read My Lips, and men in love stories. But in the generic framework Audiard has chosen so far, female heroism is in short supply. Whether he truly changes course, or continues to pursue the thematic and stylistic features that characterise his work up to now, Audiard has undoubtedly reached the peak of his career so far with A Prophet, the summation of his series of portraits of dangerously attractive male heroes.
'A Prophet' is released on 22 January, and is reviewed on page 75. A season of Jacques Audiard's films and other French thrillers runs until 31 January at BFI Southbank, London
PHOTO (COLOR): SELF-MADE HERO Having worked with some of the most powerful French actors of his era, director Jacques Audiard, right, cast the unknown Tahar Rahim, above and far right, as Malik, the hero of 'A Prophet'
PHOTO (COLOR): MOVING ON UP 'A Prophet' centres on Malik's relationship with father figure César (Nieis Arestrup, right) in a world lacking in women - with the exception of his friend's wife Djamila (Leïla Bekhti, far right)
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By Ginette Vincendeau