'A Prophet' earns crime rave

It might not have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but don't let that detail dissuade you from seeing Jacques Audiard's enthralling crime drama A Prophet. A movie this brutally tough-minded was probably always going to be a hard sell to the notoriously stodgy Foreign Film voters. Oscar or not, this Scorsese-flavored epic seems destined to become a modern classic.

Set mostly within the confines of a large prison, A Prophet introduces us to Malik (Tahar Rahim), a young Arab man living in France who has recently been convicted of violence against a police officer. Shy and wary, Malik seems at odds with the Muslim population of the prison -- which makes him an easy mark for César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), a middle-aged man who rules the powerful Corsican gang within the jail. César has some very dirty business that needs doing -- another Arab prisoner (Hichem Yacoubi) must be murdered because he's about to testify against the Corsican gang -- and thinks that Malik is the man for the job.

Audiard, who co-wrote the screenplay with three others, says he was inspired to make the film after visiting a prison to screen one of his previous films; indeed, the movie is propelled by a sense of ethnographic discovery. Shooting on an elaborately constructed set, the filmmaker does a superb job laying out the physical space, from the cramped cells to the drab courtyards, and conveying a sense of how turf is occupied and controlled by warring factions. Throughout, he captures details both glancing and telling (baguettes are served with meals, which sounds downright fancy, until you witness the widespread squalor of the prison and realize that this is definitely no country club).

Yet Audiard is not some sort of passive documentarian content to illuminate a previously shadowy corner of society. He's got genre in his bones, and A Prophet pulses with a brio that suggests many hours spent watching American crime movies, from White Heat to Mean Streets and especially GoodFellas. Malik works up the nerve to confront the marked Arab, and the murder sequence that follows seems to crack the entire movie open. Two bodies, one knife, copious amounts of blood -- and a camera that stays intimately, unnervingly close to the action. As many killings as you've seen at the movies, you've never seen one quite like this one.

After the dust settles from this early, shocking scene, A Prophet takes on an urgency and sweep that you don't entirely see coming. Audiard's two previous works, Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, are both accomplished, intimate psychological thrillers, worth tracking down on DVD. But as A Prophet charts Malik's steady, unlikely rise within the ranks of the Corsican gang, Audiard tackles grand questions about national identity, the shifting nature of political power and racial divisions in modern France. Not unlike the "Godfather" pictures, this is pulp fiction with extraordinary depth of feeling and purpose.

If there is a shortcoming, it's that A Prophet ultimately turns a little too convoluted, especially in the final third, as the double- and triple-crosses multiply. But the disparate threads are held together by a pair of exquisite performances. The unknown Rahim vividly charts his character's increasing confidence and menace. The veteran character actor Arestrup shows us a powerful man nonetheless plagued by an awareness that his power can't possibly last forever. Roles that at first seem clearly delineated -- father and son, teacher and student, prophet and apostle -- are blurred in fascinating permutations, until the very last, tragic-ironic scene. That's when you realize that the real prophet here is Audiard, a visionary filmmaker who has served up a fearless anatomy of our dog-eat-dog modern world.