“A Prophet” won the Grand
Jury prize at Cannes in 2009 and
nine awards, including best picture, best director, best actor, and
best supporting actor at the Césars. It recently was voted best non-English language film by the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts, and was nominated as best
foreign language film in this year’s
Oscars. But chances are you
haven’t seen it. Chances are, if
you’re a lawyer, politician, criminologist, social worker, or a thinking citizen of any country in the
West, you should.
You could say that French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s latest
work is “The Godfather—2010.”
But it’s more subtle and culturally
savvy than that. Nota bene, those
keen to “get tough on youth crime”
by increasing penitentiary terms
for young offenders, bunking them
in with career hoodlums: You have
not seen a more graphic and plausible representation of how hard
time can be the making of a professional criminal today.
Malik El Djebena (played with
OFF THE RECORD
JEFFREY
MILLER
PHOTO COURTESY OF MONGREL MEDIA
Tahar Rahim plays a character who at 19 is sentenced to six years in prison.
quiet aplomb by Tahar Rahim) has
just turned 19 when he is sen-
tenced to six years in La Centrale,
France’s adult county prison.
Apparently he has a colourful
young-offender record, and this
time—after he has assaulted a
police officer — he is old enough for
the pen. The details of his short,
miserable life are sketchy, but with
artful spareness that keeps you
riveted for more than two-and-a-
half hours, Audiard outlines just
enough to win your empathy: El
Djebena grew up in care and on
the street. His young body is a
geography of scars. He never knew
his parents, never had two sous to
rub together. He knows he’s Mus-
lim, but otherwise he is rootless,
with nothing to provide him a
stake in any subset of society, let
alone the larger French milieu.
or thereabouts, there comes a
“racialized” turning point whose
subtlety is all the more effective
because Audiard leaves the audience to make the connections. It’s
an Ah-ha! moment, in the back of
a van on the way to more murder
in Paris, oddly satisfying in the
brutal circumstances.
Audiard has set up the moment
perfectly, planting the plausibility
in your brain, hundreds of miles
away in Marseilles, so you don’t see
it coming on the Champs Élysées.
(It is tempting to say that Hollywood would never risk allowing
the viewer to collaborate in this
way, and though not even Coppola
did it in the “Godfather” films,
Tony Gilroy risked it, to the same
exhilarating effect, in another
Academy-Award nominee about
playing both sides of the law,
Michael Clayton.) As the Corsicans
discover, El Djebena might be
uneducated, but he’s no dummy,
and not just insofar as he quickly
learns to read French and speak
fluent Italian. Eventually, in a
breathtaking series of tactics, he
bests his masters at their own
game. He finds who he really is, in
his time and place. Prison, thanks
largely to the Corsican underworld
as “the Establishment,” is his finishing school.
See Miller Page 27
Unilingual Supreme Court of Canada judges just don’t get it
The Senate is currently studying Bill C-232, which provides
that in the future, judges of the
Supreme Court of Canada must
understand English and French
without the assistance of an
interpreter. This is a long overdue reform. In a country that
boasts about its bilingual character, it is only normal that Francophones may be heard in their
own language in the highest
court of the land.
However, former Justice John
Major argues that being unilingual did not prevent him from
doing his job properly, as interpretation allowed him to understand fully what Francophone
lawyers were saying. This is an
interesting claim to be made by a
unilingual Anglophone: how can
one evaluate the accuracy of a
translation if one does not understand the original language?
So let’s have a closer look at the
accuracy of the interpretation at
Supreme Court hearings. I argued
a case last month in the Supreme
Court. When I said, in French,
“The Gosset case affirmed the
principle of full compensation of
the injury”, the interpreter translated “Gosset says that there has
to be comprehensive damage”.
When I wanted to contrast the
civil law and the common law,
OPINION
SÉBASTIEN
GRAMMOND
which adopt different positions
on the compensation of grief, I
said, in French, that “at common
law grief is not compensable”. The
interpreter omitted to translate
“at common law”, making it sound
as if the statement related to the
civil law, thus inserting a contradiction in the English version of
my argument. Other examples of
errors are the translation of “droit
commun” (which means general
law) by “common law” (a totally
different concept), saying that
one’s rights were not breached
without specifying that I was talking about “Charter rights”, which
makes my argument incomprehensible, or saying that the second
paragraph of article 1610 of the
Civil Code was not applicable
when I said that it was.
Overall, the interpretation was
good, but inconsistencies, incom-
plete statements and, indeed,
errors such as these necessarily
affect the force and the logic of
the oral arguments presented. A
legal argument is like a chain: if
one piece breaks, the whole thing
falls apart. Legal language is
highly technical and cannot suffer
from imprecision.
