We’re at the halfway point of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and as of this writing Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is without doubt the press corps’ collective favorite film to screen in competition. Audiard has made an elegantly composed crime epic about an illiterate French Muslim teenager who goes to prison on unmentioned charges (he protests “I didn’t do anything!” after he’s been sentenced, and considering that over half of the French prison population is Muslim, he may not be lying), immediately falls in with the band of Corsican thugs who run the joint and eventually learns how to play various factions against each other to the benefit of his Islamic brethren. It plays like, well, gangbusters to an audience of journalists starved for intelligent, artistically satisfying entertainment. Whether it’ll actually play at all to North American audiences is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

Newcomer Tahar Rahim’s Malik begins his six year sentence at a typically troubled French prison intending to keep to himself. When Reyeb, a fellow Muslin and witness in a high profile trial temporarily transfered to the cell next door, offers him hash in exchange for a blow job, Malik impolitely declines. Malik changes his mind after being approached by Cesar Luciani (Neils Arestrup), the imposing but aging head of the prison’s gang of Corsican political prisoners, who has himself been ordered by the prison’s nominal powers that be to insure Reyeb doesn’t live long enough to testify. Fearing for his life, Malik does what he’s told, and then is essentially promoted to Cesar’s slave; he waits on the Corsicans hand and foot and endures all manner of racial taunting from both that crew and the opposing, much less powerful Muslim clique, until the boss slowly starts to entrust him with more responsibility — and risk. Feeding off visions of a ghostly and scarred but distressingly sedate Reyeb, Malik teaches himself to read French and speak Corsican, and, over the course of his sentence, slowly establishes himself as an untouchable force in the vein-like crime syndicates that run through the state, with prisons as the arteries.

Like Audiard’s last film, the excellent Fingers rethink The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet is an observational study of a young man of unusual intensity, whose deep brown-eyed charisma is a useful mask to distract from both what doesn’t know and what he does. As the earlier film provided a breakout vehicle for Romain Duris, so the new one sears the presence of Tahar Rahim into memory.  But where Duris’ charisma was essential to setting up the dichotomy between his thugish day-to-day and his romantic, cultured secret life, Rahim’s lure is that he keeps Malik almost completely enigmatic. Even his increasingly dope-infused fantasies — in which Reyeb appears, sometimes bathed in fire, adn through which he foresees an accident that will unexpectedly grease his criminal ascent –– tell us little about his inner life and long-term goals. In the short-term, super-cool music montages show him tricking out his cell with a DVD player and hiring the occasional hooker; it’s only in the film’s final act that we get any sense that Malik’s power of prophecy — and with it, Audiard’s film — is heading towards any more substantial purpose.

As if a two and half hour French-language film didn’t pose enough of a challenge to skittish North American buyers, a full understanding of what Audiard is up to would seem to depend on a working understanding of the complicated interplay of religious themes and contemporary French social conflict that provide the cause for the film’s effects. My cursory knowledge of the dynamics of racial rhetoric and policy in Sarkozy’s France, particularly in terms of Muslim profiling and assimilation, is enough to know that in making a film set in a French prison during a time when that country’s corrections system is known as “the nation’s shame,” nevermind a film in which Muslims outwit, outplay and outlast European nationalists with the help of an implied spiritual assist, it’s not conceivable that Audiard is “just” trying to make a really great crime flick. I don’t know enough to know how that provocation will play to audiences in its homeland, and the film doesn’t clue me in. For me, as an outsider, A Prophet is a beautifully made but not completely intellectually satisfying mirror on contemporary French upward mobility. That Audiard keeps his political intentions somewhat obscured is to the benefit of A Prophet as a genre exercise, but to its detriment as a social action.

What I do know is that A Prophet both glorifies crime and humanizes Islam, and the perfect Venn diagram overlap of the two would seem virtually guaranteed to spark a rise out of a certain brand of American conservative blowhard, were a studio to release it under the auspices of their indie arm. Some years ago, that might have been enough to guarantee at least a North American pick-up, if not some degree of audience penetration. Either outcome seems hard to fathom in the climate of now.