Native Intelligence

Un Prophete, Sony Pictures, 2009

For something completely different, here's Un Prophete (Sony, 2009). This low-key movie, directed by Jacques Audiard, is an interesting take on the prison and mafia movie genres. The story of Malik El Djebena, an illiterate French Arab imprisoned for attacking a police officer, the film documents a fragile and fractured community within the French prison. As Malik gets drawn into the dominant Corsican gang, he is not so much driven by a will to power as by circumstances and his native intelligence.  The prison is organized strictly by ethnicity and Malik's ability to cross the boundaries between them becomes an asset for him, although it is because of his very lack of strong ethnic affiliation that he works with the Corsicans at all. The Corsicans degrade and humiliate him, but they become his path to power, from which the other Arabs are excluded. In the end, then, Malik is able to reach beyond the ethnic divide within the prison and even reach past the bars to snatch at power and authority outside it. We watch this evolution happen almost despite himself, and the film manages a careful balance between sympathy and cynicism as the character becomes more and more like his oppressors. Audiard documents a complicated, morally gray world with great restraint, subtly suggesting that "prophets" are just people in the wrong place at the wrong time.