Sunday, August 22, 2010

A Prophet (Un prophète) (2009)

Director: Jacques Audiard. Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup. 155 min. Rated R. France/Italy. Drama.

Any Mafia movie is good - even the ones about an Arab gangster in a French prison. A Prophet is a very informative picture of how a naive 19-year-old can enter a prison, and "train" to become a ruthless killer and professional criminal. But the movie has also something new to add to the genre: as the proportion of Muslims in France grow, Arabs are gradually taking the reigns of the crime business from the old, arthritic French gangsters. One of the must-sees of 2009.

Mo says:

4 comments:

  1. Hey, why did they send him to solitary after he came back from the mission toward the end of the movie? Subtitles were really bad on the version I saw. I had to guess what they were really saying most of the times.

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  2. I'm assuming since the old French mobster was killing all members of the rival gang both inside and outside of prison, and the Arab had already come back from massacring some prominent gangsters on the street, they temporarily put him into solitary to protect him.

    But some parts of the story were fuzzy to me too.

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  3. So the officers in the prison knew what he had done outside the prison???

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  4. The movie was showing the prison officials were "in" on a lot stuff. I guess that explains it.

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