A prophet

A Prophet (Un prophète)
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel BencherifÖ, Hichem Yacoubi
Director: Jacques AudiardÖ
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes

Uncompromising and amoral, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is a gripping French crime film which becomes an arresting viewing. The film follows Malik El Djebena( Tahar Rahim) a 19 year old illiterate Arab Frenchman, who is sentences to six years in prison. As a fresh meat Djebena is seen as easy target by the Corsican, the blacks, and Jewish mafia. He is forced to join the Corsicans and is treated like a slave by Cesar Luciani who has a strong authority in and outside jail and is perhaps one of the most convincing psychotic, manipulative middle aged thug i have ever seen on screen. Much like Audiard’s other masterpiece The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005) , A Prophet is richly constructed, intensely satirical story about social justice and crime. Newcomer Rahim takes the audience on an initially cringeful journey of naive inmate clichés through an enticing and believable thug. With every frame the director eloquently captures the unsympathetic, hostile, drug fuelled prison environment in an unpretentious style. The effect is so pleasurably jarring the thought of selling drugs to make quick puck in your down time is no longer as appealing ( Side effects of extensive viewing of The Wire). A prophet is an art house gangster film that deserves all the hype and praise it has received since its release. Last year it won the Grand Prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign-language film. It is a film which exposes the nuance of intolerance in modern France and inadvertently suggest our prisons are not very different from society, both being controlled environment. A Prophet has very much revived the gangster drama genre. High brow film critics have described Audiard as the “French Scorsese”. However Audiard truly understands the art of storytelling and never compromises, coupled with great cinematography his films will continue to engage and create hype that many art house films can only dream about.

Bags

I have to carry
Two bags
On my back
As I walk to school

Aroha carries one
Light steps
Nee homeland

Dear Abdul

Thanks for sending me a photo of you
And taking an interest in me
I like that bright orange shirt on you
And those acid jeans look wonderful.
Did you get that from Topshop L’Afrique !
I hope you don’t mind me saying this
But you look like you need a good root.

Rumi Awakening

As I wandered the sky,
I heard Rumi
Singing a song.
"I slept in your bed
In the silent night,I murmured to your ear
ring Hoyo"
I felt delight
Then at daybreak
I went to ring you ,To hear that honey voice ;
But oh! no credit ."


The poet Rumi. Lovely dude. Shame he is not alive, then we would be lovers, renting a house in central Otago ( I am trying to be realistically as possible here, ) painting and gardening. if you want you can be his friend is well, I’m not sure if he has face book, but no doubt if he did, he will be cooler than that gaga chick. Perhaps one of my favourite lines is

"What a rapture to fly in the sky,
To tear a hundred veils every second"


ps Hoyo/mother

Young Mona

The six of us, and then there was you.
the giant,
Othello,

And faltering mermaid

And I played

Under the castle



Waiting



Mother cuddled you in white blanket
We stared at you like the nurses.
The white, quaint suburbia nursed
you into the queen of the house
The day you were born only other’s
Have the treasure to remember.

Lip service

The engine was still
orange city lights

flinch from
sky rolled in

Kebab smell

at the back seat


Tehran said.”I read your hand”

“Only the left hand”, she said

Left hand says fuck all
right hand
bears all

Tehran words fall flat
death in your family
two children
and you are a romantic.

A romantic
Surely not