A Prophet
They say that the potency of marijuana has changed drastically since the 1960’s. They say that the marijuana people smoked in the 1960’s is like oregano compared to what is commonly available nowadays. But drugs are not the only things that have gotten stronger since the 1960’s, movies are changing too. With the onset of ever more instant gratification due to internet advertising, mobile phones, and consumer tracking systems in the marketing and distribution of millions of products, people, and more specifically, the American public’s patience, attention spans, and incredulity are getting shorter, weaker, and are threatening to disappear altogether. Because of this decline in patience, attention spans of more than several second durations, and incredulity, movies (at least some) are becoming, in this writer’s humble opinion, more shocking, more intense, more graphic, and less far fetched than ever before. In the same way that marijuana has become more potent over the years, movies too have evolved in their capacities to communicate experiences. Take for example, the general, with Buster Keaton, an old, black and white silent movie. It was hailed in its time as very good. Buster Keaton was a funny guy who made people laugh and mildly stirred their emotions. He did many movies and was a very successful comedian. People knew who he was and they saw his movies because they knew that they would be rewarded with a pleasant experience, a nice short vacation from reality.
Now take a brand new movie that was just released in several theaters across the United States: A Prophet. This writer has never seen anything like it. It was unique in its relentless pace, gritty storyline, and carved-out-of-wood (hardened) characters. Very few traces of Hollywood exist in this movie. The protagonist has no romantic interest or counterpart and his only goals seem to be to out-dog-psychologize the other characters in the movie. By this I mean that he seems determined to possess a stronger will than anyone in the movie. Though exciting, mesmerizing, and impossible to turn away from, I found myself mourning for some lost element of joy or even the slightest hint of an uplifting message. Watching this movie, I felt very base instincts in myself being appealed to. It is very violent and very unforgiving in its depiction of the main character as ruthless and yet heroic. He prizes survival against desperate odds over anything else. He seems determined to do whatever is necessary to achieve satisfaction. In this writer’s humble opinion, his character is praiseworthy because of his ability to deal with reality exactly as it is and have slim to no illusions about his situation (though calling a merciless killer praiseworthy raises deep ethical issues about film as a story-telling medium). He is pragmatic, strategic, calculating and yet passionate. How much of this is his character and how much of this is the actor’s true personality is impossible to tell.
To compare The General (with Buster Keaton) and A Prophet (with Tahar Rahim) is a little like comparing apples and oranges but here goes. If you were to make the analogy using bullets, The General would be like an ordinary 22 caliber bullet: it does its job, it gets some kind of point across and if you’re in its line of fire, you’ll feel something. A Prophet would be like some sort of explosive head bullet shot out of an elephant gun that enters making a hole its size and exits leaving a hole the size of a basketball: it does its job and yours, and your family’s and your dentist’s and your lawyer’s and your milkman’s and your cousin’s and then goes on a corporate downsizing rampage, it hammers home its message with Thor’s divine hammer and then crawls inside your mind and rearranges some wiring and then writes you a couple dozen post-its and puts them up in your car and your office and your bathroom and then it makes you take acid and it explains everything again, and finally if you’re in its path, tell your next of kin.
Obviously, the analogy with drugs has already been elaborated upon so I won’t go into that again save to say that if A Prophet were marijuana, it would be some super potent genetically engineered strain that is laced with PCP or something equally horrible.
The impact of this movie definitely depends on what you bring with you when you watch it however. Some people will see gangsters, some people will see embattled religious sects, some people will see warring cultures, and some people will see the main character not as an actor but as the prison system which is the setting for the majority of the movie. One of the lessons here, in this writer’s humble opinion, is that prisons do not rehabilitate prisoners, they teach them that only the strong survive. All in all, A Prophet is, without a doubt in this writer’s mind, one of the most inordinately powerful pieces of cinema ever created. Grade A.
