Review: A Prophet (5/5); Brothers (3/5); The Boys Are Back (3/5); Ninja Assassin (1/5)

There is a moment in A Prophet, the breathtaking new film from French director Jacques Audiard, when a car full of gangsters slams into a wild deer on a country road. The world seems to pause: the stricken animal is somersaulted slowly into the air, a moment of unearthly beauty. And then the shot cuts and we see it lying dead on the road. The hero of the film, a young Arab Frenchman called Malik, could be that young deer: the movie slams into his frightened body, tosses him existentially into the universe and watches his flight. But by the time he lands, firmly on his two feet, you realise you’ve witnessed the greatest gangster film in at least two decades.
Malik is played by the unknown French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim. When we part with him, we feel like we have watched the flowering of a young De Niro. Malik is in that car, on day-release from prison for good behaviour, which he spends, naturally, promoting bad behaviour. Though when we first meet him, he’s a naïf who has just been sent down. He wears the frightened look of a teenager snatched from his bed: his scraggly head houses a pair of dark, frightened eyes. Asked if he has any friends or enemies inside, he says no. Malik, then, begins the film as a blank slate: prison precipitates a fall from grace, then his will to power. The ghosts of Coppola’s Godfather I and II lurk faintly. But A Prophet is never in service.
The man who co-opts Malik is something of a godfather. César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) is a brutal, grizzled Corsican criminal who controls prison with paid-off guards. Arestrup cuts a terrifying presence – he can do things with a spoon your mother never taught you. His henchmen could gut you with a stare. Malik, like a defenceless lamb, is cornered and told to murder a man to earn protection. For this he has to practise hiding a razor in his mouth. Malik is all cut up: it is kill or be killed.
A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is as intense as that other great French prison movie, A Man Escaped by Bresson. Both directors obsess over the behaviour of survival (although Bresson was the more pessimistic of the two). Malik becomes a lapdog for the Corsicans, and alienates his kindred Arabs. Then he starts to network. Quietly, he learns to read. He teaches himself Corsican from a dictionary. We see him learning the words ‘rage’ and ‘raging’. It seems apt: Audiard’s heros are criminals who rage against the world and its various oppressions.
We saw this in Read My Lips, where Vincent Cassell shook the screen with his volcanic personality, and with Roman Duris, in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, who cut more of a swagger. Here, though, Rahim burns from the inside. His eyes project a raw intensity. His face burns with hopelessness, survival, determination, then cunning. In one scene, crafted as a moral boundary to match Pacino’s restaurant scene in The Godfather, the camera pauses and the sound dies down, amidst bullet casings dancing in slow motion, to take a look at Malik’s face: he lies on his back surrounded by death and he’s smiling.
Audiard’s camera soaks up life with the lens of social realism. The prison is an appalling nightmare. In true gangster fashion, Malik is a hero who comes from an oppressed minority. There is a fine line here, and you worry it could stray into sober, preachy documentary. But it doesn’t. It remains electric entertainment – the grit of the film’s texture on top of great storytelling is what makes it vital.
Audiard is a sublime, understated stylist. He barely bothers with long or medium shots, choosing instead to work almost entirely with close-ups. The mood is clammy and claustrophobic. You almost hold your breath watching it. His camera is obsessed with the human face: characters live in action but it is the duress written on their face he looks out for.
Much of Audiard’s style we saw in his previous films, but here he shows off a higher register, switching at will into moments of rare poetry. Scorsese did that too, but where he was all gangster showmanship, Audiard is more concerned with the loss of innocence. His violence, too, is ugly and real. A sliced throat geysers blood red like a fountain. Death is pathetic and ugly.
Audiard has said he wanted to create an icon, an image for people “who don’t have images – the Arabs in France”. That he has done, and Malik, like all great heroes, operates mysteriously. He is always working away from the eyes of the audience. Trying to figure him out is what keeps you glued. As he matures, his gaze starts to harden. His shoulders swagger. And so they should: Malik gets to pull a remarkable sleight of hand, and right under the nose of the audience too.
Brothers, a Hollywood melodrama directed by Jim Sheridan, plays everything out in the open. Tobey Maguire’s Sam, an impossibly clean-cut US Marines captain with eyes like a strangled locust, is a poster boy for GI Responsible: he’s got Grace, a dishy wife in the shape of a blonde Natalie Portman, and two adoring daughters. On the eve of being shipped to Afghanistan, his daughter asks if he will be back for her birthday. Of course, he tells her. This is a lie, and everybody in the audience knows it. Sam goes MIA and is presumed dead. Back home, his tearaway brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes home from prison. Tommy has a temper, fuzzy stubble and still doesn’t eat his peas. So he must be trouble. The dialectic is set: can Tommy sharpen up and step into Sam’s shoes?
Brothers is a reworking of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2004 drama, Brødre, though it begins to resemble The Deer Hunter for a new war and a new generation. Cimino’s film sketched an entire society disfigured by Vietnam. The focus here is limited: for Sheridan, family is the totem of society. That totem here is dismantled by war. The lesson Tommy learns is that family counts, though dramatically, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch for him to come good.
When Sam returns home still alive, he is not only post-traumatic, but starts re-enacting Raging Bull. Sexual jealousy and psychosis begin to spill, complicating the picture. If the writing is knock-off, Sheridan’s direction is commanding. In one scene, army officers come to tell Grace she has lost her husband, and the moment, a war film cliché, breathes with life and sorrow. Portman’s response, too, is touching. She is an actress who, despite her beauty, commands with quietude. The performances lift up the film.
Grief and family are the locus, too, in The Boys Are Back. This earnest drama, from Shine director Scott Hicks, takes the story of single-parent sportswriter Simon Carr and installs Clive Owen in the leading role. I’ll bet Carr was pleased with that. Joe (Owen) is forced to look after his young son when his wife (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer. Grief blankets the house. The kitchen becomes a sty. The workaholic distant father must bond with his son. Joe turns home into a neverland where he never says no. When his estranged teenage son (George MacKay), from a marriage he fled in England, comes to stay with him, trouble brews: laissez-faire parenting threatens to topple upon him. Owen is not much of a dynamic dramatic actor. But he cuts a masculine presence: it’s good sport watching him buckle under the weight, metamorphosising from dinosaur-man into new-man.
Ninja Assassin, meanwhile, does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a gory snore.