Director: Jacques Audiard
France, 2009, 155mins, rated 18
Screening: The Phoenix, 22 January 2010
Where Jacques Audiard’s previous two films, 2001’s Read My Lips and 2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both flirted with Noir-ish elements of the French criminal underworld, his latest film, A Prophet, immerses us fully in the dark hinterland of France’s criminal underclass. Inspired by conditions he'd witnessed when screening one of his films in a French prison, Audiard brings us an epic, sprawling and intense thriller that works as both a coming-of-age journey and a stark exposé of the French penal system – with all its institutional racism and corrupt gangster operations.
