But if Audiard is to be believed, none of this was his intention. “Of course it has no message,” the director said in an interview with Karin Badt of the Huffington Post, “it’s fiction, it comes from nowhere.”

The film, which follows a young, illiterate Arab convict’s initiation into brutal prison society, opens in the US in March. It has already caused quite a stir in France.  Ticket sales are huge.  Reviews are almost universally positive.  It’s already been selected as the country’s official entry into the Oscars’ Foreign Language category.  All of this buzz has made prison reform the cause célèbre, pushing up the stock of a Parliamentary bill, apparently the first since WWII, which aims to institute changes.

Yet Audiard, ingeniously or not, continues to play the fool, blaming this political dustup on over-analysis.  His goal, as explained to Kenneth Turan of the LA Times, was not social criticism but to create “icons, images for people who don’t have images, the Arabs in France.”  He references Brian De Palma’s “Scarface,” posing his own film as a more relatable alternative, one that features a hero less riddled with unattractive flaws.

This isn’t impossible to imagine.  On one level, “A Prophet” functions as pure wish-fulfillment cinema, a kind of tweaked Horatio Alger story that’s been the backdrop of a thousand gangster movies.  We get a hero (the baby-faced Malik played quietly by Tahar Rahim) who starts with nothing, is thrown into one terrible circumstance after another, yet through sheer cleverness and skill makes it to the top.  He’s Tony Montana or Tony Camonte or Tom Powers without the hubris or corrective downfall.

Yet even a movie like “Scarface” had a political element, and it’s hard to imagine, considering the film’s persistent invoking of social ills, that these trappings are accidental.  Malik, shockingly uneducated, without family or connections, surrounded by hostile forces comes across as a microcosm of the Arab experience in France.  He claims to be innocent, and while we never learn if this is true, there is a clear theme that life in jail is what really makes him a criminal, from his forced recruitment by a Corsican gang to his gradual scaling up of activities, smuggling goods to drugs to murder.

It seems even stranger to consider “A Prophet” as a straight action thriller.  Malik is believable in some ways as an iconic hero, but not when he’s been placed in a film that’s so honest about the consequences of his actions, its portrayals of violence realistic and unsparing.  The mix of heroism, queasy behavior and politicized action seems to echo “The Battle of Algiers” more than “Scarface,” which presented its violence at such a cartoonish level as to render it completely remote from human experience.  The comparison to the former may be softened by the fact that Malik’s victims, excepting one terrified but unharmed mother, are all criminals, but the film’s violence is tinged with regret and often painful to watch.  An early fight scene, where Malik is forced to commit murder then nearly botches it due to nervousness, is particularly joyless, a painful sequence that positions the character more as a victim of circumstance than an action hero.

Even when disregarding tone and content, to consider “A Prophet” without its political element, its deft and incisive handling of these issues, is to rob it of its vitality.  What’s left is a thriller that, while gripping, is also riddled with problems.  The entire “prophet” angle, where Malik’s ascent is scantily ascribed to some supernatural quality, is baffling and unnecessary and leads to a host of tacky devices: foggy dream sequences, clunky omens, a nagging ghost who functions only as a persistent, overgrown metaphor.  These are all stylistic excesses that end up as minor quibbles but ones that stand out in far sharper relief in a film robbed of higher aspirations of social context.

To view “A Prophet” then as strictly popcorn cinema is not only reductive and strange, but would also force us to embrace some of its worst qualities.

This all leads to Audiard’s real intention behind his statements, and if they accurately reflect his true aims.  Is he being purposely oblique?  Teasing?  Or is he afraid being dubbed a “socially conscious prison drama” will hurt the movie’s chances for success in the US?  Does any of this matter?

It’s likely that it won’t.  With the amount of attention that has been provoked “A Prophet’s” legacy seems already to be solidified.  Any changes to the system that occur will be inextricably tied to it, assuring it’s remembered for its politic element, whether intended or not.  The fact remains that Audiard is less an arbiter of his film’s legacy than public perception.  Being branded as a political movie has made it one, regardless of intention; in this case, it’s all the better for it.