Given six years for minor infractions and “attacking cops,” the illiterate nineteen-year-old Arab-Corsican-Frenchman has no family or friends, no religion or beliefs, vocation or vices. Dirty, beaten and cuffed, “I can walk by myself, how dumb do I look?” and is indeed a quick pupil who starts off his sentence and the film a tabula rasa, with no history, connections or purpose.

The son of a director, screenwriter and sometimes his collaborator, Jacques Audiard has directed only four other films, admired on the Continent and pointedly pessimistic in outlook. However, after two-and-a-half hours of twists and gyrations, Prophet closes on an oddly arranged, precarious up note.

The film would have its hero intuitively smart. He is better described as protean, or versatile/adaptable, although all along he had appeared procrustean, a victim of situation and fate. Innocent and a loner, the light-skinned newcomer is noticed by César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), capo of the Corsican-French inmates who control things within the prison along with continuing to do business outside it.

Of its type nowadays, the film is relatively, and commendably, free of macho muscleheads and scarlet bloodsplatter, even while its Brando-ish godfather threatens death if the newcomer refuses to whack Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab stool-pigeon in brief protective custody. This bookish target had propositioned Malik, hash for sex, so the Corsicans force the latter to accept and then kill. Mission accomplished, Malik is under César’s protection, his ethnicity insulted as forced gofer and drudge and his dreams visited by the weird, compassionate spirit of Reyeb.

SPOILER ALERT

Keeping his mouth shut, the hero works in the prison’s shops and studies in its classes. Ethnic brothers shun him on account of his “employers,” but he grows close to Ryad (Adel Bencherif), a grammar teacher of his who has survived testicular cancer and is soon to be released to join wife Djamila (Leïla Bekhti) and baby Issam, now Malik’s godson. With a quick ear and a dictionary, he secretly picks up the Corsicans’ dialect of Italian and, through their connections, is granted half-day leaves during which to run their errands. Unknown to them, he also multitasks for prisoner Jordi the Gypsy (Reda Kateb), a dealer in soft drugs who envisions a bright future for the two of them.

The already stuffed plot of this blue-hued prison drama now spins out of control, so that afterwards viewers had trouble agreeing on characters, motives and events. Someone ventured a Yojimbo-A Fistful of Dollars parallel, a playing off of two groups against each another, perhaps in light of Audiard’s title preference of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the 1979 born-again Dylan reiteration that every man follows his heavenly or hellish master.

Malik may have a plan or may wing it, but too many things fly too fast and furiously -- a first, seconds-long airplane ride (nicely done); a mosque and imam, cached kilos and Egyptians; a highway deer-crossing sign and an outdoor beach restaurant lunch; an increasing Muslim prison population and transfers or releases for fifteen of the twenty Corsicans; a bafflingly complicated and carried out Mace attack and van rub out.

The most interesting of this overload of players, César alternates between a velvet and an iron glove. Ageing and run to flab in his underwear, he holds sway through confident arrogance and others’ fear. Never crossing over into the single generous gesture one thinks will come, he gets his reward in a simple way that is more logical and satisfying than in most such films. What today is popularized as a “survivor,” Malik, too, gets his unexpected reward.

Things, however, have gotten impossibly involved getting them to that point. As film, the director’s “world as it is, as it plays out,” complicates itself too much. 

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "R" for violence, sexual content, nudity, language and drug material.)