Introduction

In Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film Un prophète, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), the Franco-Arabic protagonist, is sentenced to six years in prison for attacking police officers. Once there, he is forced to murder an Arab-Muslim inmate, Reyeb, for the prison’s Corsican mafia leader, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup). Malik is literally told to kill Reyeb or be killed. Once the deed is done, he comes under César’s protection and begins working for the Corsicans – a group who are French citizens, but largely marginalised in France – who use and abuse Malik. Although protected by them, the Corsicans relegate Malik to the metaphorical edges of their world, othering him just as his association with them makes him an ‘other’ to and isolates him from the Arab-Muslim prison gangs. Yet at the same time, Malik uses the prison to learn how to be a ‘better’ criminal so that upon his release from prison in the film’s end, he undoes the Corsican faction and emerges a powerful gangster.

Malik’s trajectory – he enters prison a weak and petty (ethnically coded) criminal but emerges an organised crime boss – is perhaps in itself not such an unfamiliar story. Many French critics have likened it to The Godfather and even more so to De Palma’s Scarface. The only real critique of Un prophète when it was released was that this film made Malik a ‘hero’ or a ‘model’, especially for the male youth in France’s stigmatised banlieues, much like Scarface’s Tony Montana is for these young men (Durand-Souffland 2010, np). Unlike Tony Montana and other classic gangster stories, though, Malik never learns the ‘moralistic lesson … [that] crime doesn’t pay’ (Langford 2005: 21, 138). So what makes Malik different from these other criminal anti-heroes? The answer lies in how he ascends to power, which is, ironically, what initially makes him an easier target for the Corsicans. Malik lives in a France in which people of Arabic descent generally occupy the periphery and are, thus, excluded socially and politically from belonging to the nation. It is Malik’s very marginality, to which both French society and the other prisoners relegate him, that allows him to cross metaphorical borders in the pursuit of power.