Crime without Borders: Marginality and Transnational Power in Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète

Abstract

In Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film, Un Prophète, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), the Franco-Arabic protagonist, enters prison a meek criminal but emerges a powerful gangster. What enables Malik to accrue power is, ironically, what initially makes him an easier target for the prison gangs: his marginality. He lives in a French society in which people of Arabic descent occupy the periphery. Added to that is Malik's own uncertainty as to his origins and the marginalisations he experiences at the hand of multiple ethnicised prison gangs. Yet, Malik takes advantage of his peripheral position to establish criminal networks with other groups historically marginalised in France and moves to the centre of his own transnational criminal operation. Drawing on theories of diaspora and transnationalism, this essay argues that Malik’s marginality results in an embodiment of a transnational criminal, not just in that he engages with criminals from multiple national backgrounds, but also in that he himself engages with multiple nations in his identity. Malik’s ambiguous origins transcend linguistic, ethnic, and national borders, and it is this transnational identity which allows Malik to deftly manoeuvre the space of the prison and create a criminal space that operates outside of the centre/periphery dichotomy.