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A Prophet shows us a multilingual future for cinema

UK

Chapeau : Most of us now live in a globalised, polyglot world, and Jacques Audiard's prison drama is a rare film that reflects that

Source : Culture Europe International (http://www.culture-europe-international.org)
01 49 40 72 46 - contact@culture-europe-international.org
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Rubrique : Revue de presse

du 05/02/2010 00:00 au 05/05/2010 00:00
Paris France



Texte : Par Phil HOAD
The Guardian
UK
January 28th, 2010
(extracts)

Director Jacques Audiard has always been great at gauging the pace on the street and slipping into the dip and swerve of contemporary life to generate maximum zeitgeisty white noise in his films. Where he really nails it in his new film A Prophet is with language: its polyglot swirls of French, Arabic and Corsican might give subtitlers the sweats, but feel like a very attuned reflection of multicultural chaos, the exhilarating tangle of tongues that makes up social and business life in most global capitals now.

English is still the dominant language, of course, in the cinema as much as anywhere else. But what's artistically exciting is the growing sense that English is no longer synonymous with the dominant reality; that it's in dynamic competition with other languages, and by implication other perspectives. We're finally seeing the resulting collisions and confusions unfold even in popcorn cinema, which used to be to foreign languages what Agent Orange was to Vietnamese horticulture.

Linguistically speaking, Slumdog Millionaire wasn't revolutionary, but what was remarkable was that a film one-third in Hindi picked up so many Oscars. Quentin Tarantino – always a man with a sharp ear – took things one stage further in the summer. Inglourious Basterds' arch-linguist Colonel Hans Landa theatrically juggled English, French and his liebe Muttersprache like an SS music-hall compere. (...)

But A Prophet – several more shades towards the arthouse end of the spectrum – is much more sophisticated than both. (...) Audiard's film is built from the ground up on this strategy of dramatising cultural differences. Language, and the ability to wield it, is pivotal. French, not English, is the lingua franca in the prison, but it is Malik's (Tahar Rahim) fluency in other languages that drives the plot, and his rise to power. (...)

The film catches the dark side of language – its relationship to power; it can be a badge of belonging and is used to exclude as well. And it understands it is not static, with mistakes, misunderstandings and incomprehension ready currency for smart operators such as Malik.

The globalised world needs more linguist cinema like A Prophet – limber, alert and opportunistic. (...)

Stranded in cultural no-man's-land, Malik is left to forge his own destiny – a lesson for us all in an increasingly complicated world. He is almost a proxy for the fast-growing mixed-race and multilingual masses who are the next step on from old monocultures. They are the ones placed to thrive as the patterns of world power grow more enmeshed and hard to fathom. (...)

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Date de publication : 28/01/2010


Période traitée : 2010-01-28
Mots-clés : Jacques Audiard, A prophet, Un prophète, multilingualism, multicultural, Arabic, French, Corsican, English, Slumdog Millionaire, Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino, Quentin Tarantino, Tahar Rahim, Malik, monoculture,
Inséré le : 05/02/2010 10:59