After seeing Audiard’s Un Prophete, I scoured the internet for other reviews of the film which appealed to my political agenda and my thoughts more generally. I didn’t really find any, so I thought I would write down some of my initial reactions.
To be totally reductive, Un Prophete has been described as the Godfather meets The Battle of Algiers. As my knowledge of the crime film is limited, I’ll stick to the assessment of it as the latter. Un Prophete is much more and much less than The Battle of Algiers, yes by and large the key players are the same–the French and the North African. And it many ways the film produces the same anti-colonial sentiment, but Un Prophete is less about the brown nation and more about the brown body, the persona, and his or her relation to the French state– the banlieue, the prison. Un Prophete is loaded with religious themes. Thus, our persona is then refracted through Islam. Where the crossroads of the world is not Mecca, but the French prison.
In many ways, the film performs certain sacrilege. We see our Franco-Magrabi Mohammed, or Malik learning to suck dick with a blade in his mouth– his Angel Gabriel is then the man he kills with said blade, whose spectral form visits Malik on the regular. In one the film’s more spectacular moments and quite clearly one of the filmmaker’s favorite moments, we see Malik rather daringly murdering a handful of heavily armored and armed Italians. Malik leaves the armored car with his bounty, deafened by the incident. To the Muslim viewer appealing to Audiard’s visual langauge, the experience of a close-range gun shot is then attempting replicate the deafening voice of God. Despite all of this, we do not see Malik as religious at all, his allegiances to other North Africans, Arabs and Muslims are ambivalent at best.
In interviews, Audiard has denied the film any religious subtext. Yet at the same time, he still aims rather high. Audiard hopes the film will create “icons, images for people who don’t have images, the Arabs in France.” And quite clearly the film is poised to do that, however, I think here there must be some recognition of the difference between the director’s social identity and his production of brown and black bodies with the hope that it will then inspire similarly raced audiences. And quite frankly, I’m not entirely sure this film is going to illegally downloaded in the French suburbs. And perhaps I’m being unfair here, but’s fate might be closer to that of The Battle of Algiers– The Knesset and The Pentagon.
In the end, I think Audiard’s film is most successful in one of the film’s final scenes with our Angel Gabriel. Our Angel invites Malik to read–citing the Prophet and Gabriel’s first encounter. “Iqra” — Read. Where the audience and Malik are invited to do much for than that–that we too can be prophets?
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