Prophets and other religious entities

Prisons are for movie directors, what lollipops are for children: they cannot get enough of them. And just when you think you've seen enough of prison dramas and there no other new thing you could possibly want to see, Un prophéte appears and sets a whole new ball game all together.

Let me be entirely clear about something: I loved the movie. And funnily enough I didn't expect that at all. For once, it is a French movie and I don't get along very well with French movies, I find them slow, long, pretentious and tedious. But this one so was not all of these. I think the best way to describe the movie was that it was crystal. Some movies have this quality, of being so clearly good that you don't have to think about them, you don't have to qualify your answer, you don't have to excuse the mishaps, you don't have to half-cringe some moments when you watch them. You just sit there and enjoy them from the beginning till the end, and just simply like everything about them. I think the last movie I felt so clearly about was oldboy. And un prophéte is way up there with the cunning Korean.

Perhaps it was the script: the rise of a nobody in the microcosm of the French prison, Malik's relationship with Cesar: so complex and deep, the clear analogy between the anthropology of the prison and French society, the haunting relationship between Malik and Reyeb.

Perhaps it was the acting: The glorious newcomer Tahar Rakim as Malik, with his piercing eyes, Niels Arestrup as the arrogant and fooling Cesar and everybody in the supporting cast.

Perhaps it was the cinematography, the grittiness of the prisons, the bluntness of the blood, the sharpness of the Northern sun. Or the innovative techniques of freeze frames, the combination of cinema verité with magic realism and the colours of the movie.

The success of the prophet is found in the combination of all of the above to tell a seemingly banal story (petty criminal enters the prison as a frightened nobody and exits it as a crime lord) with an unexpected breath of fresh air.

If it doesn't win the foreign language film Oscar, I will eat my hat.

In anticipation (a.k.a. ode to the past)

**** Update: awesome album! Fresh, exciting, dark but not solipsistic, modern yet a classic. As always.



Massive attack are releasing their new album, Heligoland, tomorrow. In anticipation of this, the guardian has a small retrospective on their work, their collaborations and their most inspirational moments. Reading it made me realise that some things are really classic despite seeming too era-specific. Let me explain: sometimes it seem that the notion of timelessness that is often associated with classic things is also in turn associated with something that when you see it (hear it, read it etc) it does not reveal the era that it came from. Ancient Greek tragedies for examples are archetypical stories, that when stripped from their era-particular characteristics, they can function perfectly in any space and time. You can direct Medea set in the 21st century and the backbone of the story (revenge and jealousy- the beast that lies in us all) can still work.

I think however that for something to become eventually a classic it needs to be exceptionally modern (almost ahead of its time) at the same time. Medea would have never been a classic if it hadn't been so modern when it was written. Hamlet would have never become a classic if it hadn't shattered the norms of theatre, with the introduction of the ultimate anti-hero, the reluctant prince, when it was first written. There is no way something will become a classic if it is not also painfully new and modern.

Massive attack's music is, for me, the ultimate '90's music. Unfinished sympathy is often labelled the song of the decade (like Paranoid android is the song of the '00's) and the band itself had been the pioneers of the quintessential '90's movement, trip-hop. In that sense, when you listen to blue lines or protection, some songs might sound dated and essentially yesterday-ish. But I think, this is what makes Massive attack's music so classic, it is a product of its time and yet it was ahead of its time. It defined and decade and can therefore classically represent this decade forever.