A Prophet
Director: Jacques Audiard
The Boys Are Back
Director: Scott Hicks
Breathless
Director: Yang Ik-june
It’s a good bet that the most enthusiastically reviewed new film of 2010 will turn out to be Jacques Audiard’s prison drama A Prophet. It was many critics’ choice as the cream of the crop after premiering to near-universal acclaim at Cannes last May. One scribe perceived an allegory for the life of the prophet Mohammed, another interpreted its plot, whereby greenhorn Malik (Tahar Rahim) learns the ropes – and plays off various factions against each other to his own ultimate benefit over the course of a six-year sentence – as a commentary upon “the demographic shifts in French society” since 1959.
A Prophet is one of those rare foreign-language films that even people who don’t usually venture far from multiplexes feel they should see. That’s despite the daunting running time and the occasional outburst of graphic bloodshed. The film continues Audiard’s fascination with criminality, but in trying to expand his vision to a larger, even more audacious canvas, his limitations are exposed.
That’s because, while it’s dominated by a truly sensational lead performance by unknown Rahim and is shot with a chilly brilliance by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, with a terrifically low-key score by Alexandre Desplat, A Prophet falls down on the crucial matter of the script. Malik’s total lack of family ties and friendship bonds outside jail is an implausible contrivance, but pivotal to the plot. It explains why he must get on the good side of the prison’s Mr Big, Luciani (Niels Arestrup.) And while his complex relationship with Luciani is sensitively dramatised, there’s not much sense of the wider dynamics of the “big house” – a surprising omission, given the notional creative latitude afforded by the running time.
Malik’s transition from nervy illiterate to swaggeringly confident linguist is engaging to watch, but somewhat unlikely – as is his ability to pull off a series of increasingly elaborate criminal activities while on day-release. Indeed, the major fault of Audiard’s screenplay is that the day-release shenanigans gradually take such precedence. After a while, it’s possible to forget the fact that Malik is actually “in” jail at all.
Various dream-sequences and hallucinations – in which Malik is “visited” by a man he’s been forced (in the most startling of several intense set-pieces) to murder with a razor blade – further impede the narrative flow. Such fanciful contrivances sit awkwardly with A Prophet’s core strengths of simplicity, directness and brutal claustrophobia: Audiard, like his protagonist, struggles to reconcile his tough-guy aspirations with a more reflective sensitivity in this fascinating but deeply flawed would-be epic.
Scott Hicks’ eminently missable The Boys Are Back is a misbegotten fictionalisation of a how-to-bring-up-boys guide by The Independent’s parliamentary sketch-writer Simon Carr. Presumably because of Hicks’ antipodean origins, the story now takes place in sun-dappled Australia, where expatriate sportswriter Joe Warr (Clive Owen) is left as a clueless single parent by the tragically premature death of his wife Katy (Laura Fraser).
Rather like Malik’s “haunting” in A Prophet, The Boys Are Back sees Katy occasionally pop up as a figment of Joe’s
grief-wracked imagination. Given the raffish opulence of the family abode, it’s easy to see why she’s so keen to hang around. Connoisseurs of prime Aussie real estate will be in clover, as will anyone with a penchant for clumsily-developed, life-lesson tearjerkers about good-looking, well-heeled people whose children are prone to mildly wayward dysfunction. It’s certainly nice to look at, but the advert-style glossiness ultimately proves somewhat wearing.
This is even before a third act which pivots on some decidedly hokey plot-developments, including Joe covering the Australian Open tennis watching it on television and a daft episode involving a wild house party thrown during one of his regular absences. “Life is a journey that must be travelled no matter how hard the road”, Joe drones in voiceover at the start. The Boys Are Back, conversely, is one cinematic journey which may be safely eschewed.
South Korean writer-director-producer Yang Ik-june makes an impressively swaggering debut with his unapologetically violent and relentlessly foul-mouthed drama Breathless. Not only does his first turn behind the camera result in a picture that’s won critical acclaim and film-festival awards, but Yang is also the star of the movie, and his entrance – nonchalantly wielding a baseball bat to break up a street-demo – is a startling one
As this indicates, Yang’s Kim Sang-hoon is rather more anti-hero than conventional leading man. A small-time, utterly amoral muscle-for-hire hoodlum working mainly as enforcer for loan shark Man-shik (Jeong Man-shik), Sang-hoon’s first resort in pretty much every situation is violence, usually accompanied by a volley of four-letter strewn verbal abuse. An unreconstructed bruiser of the old school he has a certain bad-boy charisma, but is fundamentally unsympathetic and unredeemed – until he meets precocious schoolgirl Yoon-hee (Kim Kot-bi). After a decidedly inauspicious start (he accidentally spits on her in the street and, when she remonstrates, assaults her), Sang-hoon’s softish centre gradually emerges, along with the belated dawning of conscience, responsibility and maturity. What ensues is a kind of romance between two individuals who seem to come from entirely different (though adjacent) urban worlds, but who turn out to share deeply dysfunctional family lives.
In a movie which is much concerned with issues of “blood”, the underlying malaise being diagnosed and illustrated turns out to be a strain of domestic violence which seems to be endemic in contemporary Korean society. Breathless is unstinting in its exploration of the worst sides of human nature. Although Yoon-hee and Sang-hoon’s touchingly platonic friendship forms the emotional core of the picture, the dramatic focus coalesces around her volatile brother Yeong-jae (Lee Hwan), a seemingly mild-mannered sort who ends up working for
Man-shik’s gang. This leads to an uncompromising climax of extreme brutality – all of a piece with a picture that, whatever its faults, never pulls its punches.
It takes a certain degree of brass neck to choose Breathless as the English-language title of your first movie – exactly half a century after Jean-Luc Godard did exactly the same thing. Yang almost certainly won’t end up having the same impact, but anyone seriously interested in contemporary crime movies or transgressive east Asian cinema should seek him out.
Neil Young
