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.
