The director of Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped delivers his best film to date in this coruscating prison drama. With supreme confidence, Jacques Audiard shifts registers effortlessly in style and tone in this riveting dissection of contemporary France’s multi-cultural underbelly.
Tender, lyrical and angry in equal measure, this is a deeply political film about race, religion, masculinity and the relentless economics of capitalism in the violent microcosm of the French penal system. But before anyone thinks this is another simplistic trip into France’s colonial guilt, Audiard ensures his film is first and foremost about the everyday decisions of life and death that form and deform its lead character.
Nineteen year old Muslim El Djebana (Tahar Rahim) is sent to prison for drunkenly assaulting a policeman.
Inside, he tries to steer clear of trouble, but his youthful vulnerability is no match for the tough cynical long-term inmates of the Coriscan mob, who quickly alienate him from his peers and use him as a tool to murder a man inside preparing to testify against them. Soon he is their lapdog – but eventually he will establish his own identity, and carve out a niche for himself within the prison landscape…