Word: audiard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Grand Prix (second place): Un prophéte, France, directed by Jacques Audiard...
...runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to Un prophéte (A Prophet), a complex, absorbing, fairly conventional prison drama directed by Jacques Audiard. In the manner of last year's Palme d'Or winner The Class, set in a Paris junior high school, this is a documentary-style study of French minorities in an enclosed environment that sets its own rules. The main tension - and there's plenty in the schemings of rival ethnic gangs - comes from the relationship of a young Arab (Tahar Rahim) and his aged Corsican mentor (Niels Arestrup). When asked at the post-show press...
...movies are getting more imaginative and accessible. Just look at the Taxi films of Luc Besson and Gérard Krawczyk, a rollicking series of Hong Kong-style action comedies; or at such intelligent yet crowd-pleasing works as Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both hits on the foreign art-house circuit. French novelists are focusing increasingly on the here and now: one of the big books of this year's literary rentrée, Yasmina Reza's L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk...
...haunted by the career he abandoned-as a promising concert pianist, which his mother also once was. It's an improbably melodramatic premise-Golden Boy reset in Paris-and also a remake of the American film Fingers. But that reckons without the canny direction of Jacques Audiard and the appealing work of Romain Duris as the muscle man-musician. His efforts to reclaim himself are told with irony, a touch of almost unspoken romance and surprising, but plausible, results as the movie moves from noirish darkness to the more sunlit realms of artistic aspiration...
...same way with Audiard's characters. It's probably safe to say that there has never been a hood who aspired to the concert stage. But the child of a roughneck father and an elegant mother who has lived an ambivalent, ultimately untriumphant life as a result is not unfamiliar. Out of a borrowed and preposterous premise, Audiard has fashioned a film that is more haunting--and more compellingly watchable--than it has any right...