Un Prophète

I want to go to prison in France! There the lady guards say "please" as they order you around, everyone gets his own baguette with every meal, and dudes on the playground wear fitted brown suede jackets, while others sun themselves with reflective tanning devices.

Everyone's talking about Un Prophète. Jacques Audiard's follow-up to 2005's The Beat My Heart Skipped is indeed good, but I fail to see how it merits the extent of the critical acclaim that it's received. It's such a masturbatory boy-director Tarantino/Doyle/Godfather-esque etc derivative bit of aimlessness in many ways, that I would write it off were it not touching and illuminating in other ways. I like the matter-of-fact and poetic way Malik (Tahar Rahim) is haunted by the fellow prisoner he is forced to kill, for example. And this might not be an indication of it's greatness, but every mention of literacy in the first half of it made me tear up uncontrollably. I'm loving the films coming out of France (and Europe in general) over the past decade dealing with immigrant populations and the richness and realness that gives lives and stories. Watching the prison interiors of Prophète evoked for me Steve McQueen's Hunger (2009), and Manijeh Hekmat's Women's Prison (2002), and I think that has as much to do with the common cinematic depictions as with the foreign depictions of prison-life. But each of those films was dealing with prisoners quite different from the straight-up criminals depicted here, and it's this glorified corruptness- even with the unjust truths it also portrays- that keeps me from really buying the film.

Andréa described this film as "powerfully depressing" as we left the theater.  I think that's saying something, right?