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Race for the Palme
As the first weekend of the Cannes Film Festival winds down, it looks as though there’s a clear, early leader for the Palme d’Or.
Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” is almost flawless filmmaking, tracking the experiences of a 19-year-old Arab-French kid who’s thrown in prison for six years for unspecified crimes.
The highly structured prison environment mirrors that on the outside, with the rising numbers of Arabs causing tensions among the old-liner criminals, especially the Corsican Mafia. And Malik, being of multiracial heritage, doesn’t seem to fit in any group.
He ends up working as the errand boy for the Corsicans, simply because they’re the first to make a move on him. But he keeps his mouth shut and quickly learns hows to survive. An early battle with razor blades has to be one of the most shockingly real sequences to be put on film in a long time.
As a rising criminal, Malik, as played by newcomer Tahar Rahim, is haunted by his conscience. As Audiard said Saturday, he’s not a sociopath. He’s just trying to get out of prison alive.
Rahim, who was trained in acting at a university and went on to appear in plays in Paris and had a brief stint on a French TV series, has a natural gift of showing his inner thoughts. The looks on his face are pitch-perfect. And the way he carries himself suits the Malik character perfectly.
The only other movie that appears to be in competition with “A Prophet” at this point appears to be Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” a look at the romance between poet John Keats and seamstress Fanny Brawne.
But the festival is only halfway over, with a lot of big names still to show up on the Croisette.
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