Directed by Jacques Audiard

I watched this movie a few weeks ago, and have been thinking about how to describe it. The synopsis on IMDB doesn’t offer much as to what actually happens in the film. I think this excerpt from Roger Ebert’s four star review does a pretty good job setting the stage though:

“The movie, one of this year’s foreign film Oscar nominees, follows the life of Malik, a young Frenchman of Arab descent, who enters prison as a naive outsider and is shaped into an evil, adult criminal. He wasn’t born evil; he was born a shy, passive loser. Prison made him all that he can be. He seems an unlikely protagonist for a prison movie. Played by Tahar Rahim, he’s skinny, insecure, trying to raise a mustache. He’s behind bars for unclear reasons; he claims he’s innocent, although it doesn’t matter. Prison efficiently strips him of privacy and self-respect and serves him over to the Corsican gang that controls everything behind bars through violence and bribes.”

The film essentially chronicles this weak, timid prisoner’s journey within the prison, from fighting for survival to establishing himself as a force of prison society to be reckoned with, politically if not physically. The cultural divides of the prison really enrich the story as well, telling a story that I think works as well as its own as it does as an analogy for society at-large.

Absolutely worth watching.