gpadillo

In his first two films, Jacques Audiard made me want to really like him, and while the world went a bit gaga for "De battre mon Coeur s'est Arrete" (and I enjoyed it well enough), I felt something just missing for me. I therefore may have approached "Un Prophete" with more than a bit of anxiety. I needn't have for within a single minute I fell headlong into the dangerous world of one of 2009's most powerful films.

Aduiard draws us into the life of 19 year old French/Arab Malik El Djebena, a street kid, now incarcerated for the first time in an adult prison. Malik wishes nothing but to be left alone and serve his six years without incident. He never gets that chance. For two and a half hours, we ar mesmerized as we witness Malik's journey from innocence and subservience to the most powerful king pin in the prison.

Tahar Rahim's performance is nothing short of astonishing, making the morose and frightened Malik a character you can only route for throughout his tortured six year stint. Uneducated, but wise beyond his years, the young prisoner improves himself through education, craft, cunning allowing his restlessness to steer him in whatever direction it needs in order to survive. As César Luciani, overlord of the prison, Niels Arestrup's is the perfect foil to Rahim's Malik and the scenes between Corsican master and Arab servant crackle with a nervous energy while Aduaiard keeps layering tension, mistrust, honor, privilege and loyalty into the mixture leading everything to a predictable, but wholly satisfying conclusion.

Audiard's style makes life in this prison alternately real and surreal tossing in elements of fantasy and madness which coalesce with a beautifully disturbing madness, such as Malik's repeated visitations of his first victim, a man he was forced by Luciani and his thugs in order to justify his own existence. You cannot make a prison movie without kindness and brotherhood entering into the equation and the friendship between Malik and fellow Arab prisoner, Ryab (a terrific performance by Adel Bencherif) establish a bond that will be not only far reaching but ultimately the salvation for both men.

Racism, too is ever a present guest here and I could only watch in wonder and respect as Malik moves between the Muslims, Egyptians, Italians, Corsicans and French judging the worth of each on their own merits (or how he can best use them) rather than the prejudice the others use to define their worlds.

Dark, gritty, powerful yet full of hope, "Un Prophete" beats just about any U.S. studio made film last year and I hope it receives the recognition it deserves Stateside. A truly remarkable and emotionally rewarding movie.

I just finished watching a movie that, when I first saw it in 1986, made such an impression on me that I could think of nothing else for days. It came at a fragile and life changing moment in my life and for some seven nights I walked several miles back and forth in a bitter winter to see it at the once splendid Ontario Theatre in Washington, DC. The film was Roland Joffé's epic "The Mission" with the unlikely cast of Jeremy Irons, Robert DeNiro, Liam Neeson and Ray McNally. When I first saw it I thought it to be amongst the most beautiful films I'd ever seen, and nearly 25 years later, think so still. While nominated and winning many international awards, The Mission was mostly ignored by Hollywood, receiving only one Oscar (cinematography).

The complexities of the story telling in "The Mission" are almost too much to take in in a single film lasting a bit more than two hours, but Jaffe has woven them together with a touch that is both delicate and profound, creating a tapestry as impressive and intricate as any medieval Flemish tapestry, its story held together flawlessly.

While supposedly created for our own preservation and edification, politics and religion have done as much or more unspeakable horrors in the names of God and Man as they have good and in "The Mission" we see the bloody result, despite the effort of a few rebel priests who believe in the power of love and the natives with whom they try to share their world. The villains are plentiful in this "true tale" and Joffe never disguises them, allowing the deceptive simplicities of "good versus evil" run its predictable course, as they twist and turn everything they touch into the inevitable choked and knotted apocalypse of sorrow that is always the end result of greed.

Despite its bleak, often hopeless nature, Joffe nonetheless gives us a miracle: a film of such ineffable beauty that stirs both heart and mind through the combination of remarkable acting, a wilderness captured in breathtaking cinematography, battles both physical and spiritual, and wed it all to one of the most remarkable musical scores of the late 20th century.