A Prayer Before Dawn

In a sea of intri­cate­ly-tat­tooed brown bod­ies, a broad, freck­led Eng­lish­man stands out like the prover­bial sore thumb. In the sto­ried tra­di­tion of the prison film, A Prayer Before Dawn sees a young repro­bate from Liv­er­pool thrown into the big house. But what he has to face is more than your run-of-the-mill pen­i­ten­tiary: he’s in the Bangkok Hilton, a noto­ri­ous Thai prison where one year of incar­cer­a­tion is rough­ly equiv­a­lent to five in the US.

Bil­ly Moore, the real-life crim who wrote a best­selling mem­oir about his trau­mat­ic time in the prison after his arrest for drug pos­ses­sion, is played here by Joe Cole, who turns in a star-mak­ing per­for­mance of sav­age phys­i­cal­i­ty, imag­in­ing Bil­ly as a rage-filled addict for­ev­er poised on the brink of vio­lence. While behind bars Moore became a cham­pi­on prison Muay Thai fight­er, giv­ing him a degree of sta­bil­i­ty in a volatile world. Chiefly, the film fol­lows this strug­gle, see­ing Moore vol­ley between the dis­ci­pline of the rit­u­al­is­tic sport and the dan­gers of gang life.

Faced by a glar­ing racial dif­fer­ence and no nat­ur­al clique to join for pro­tec­tion, Bil­ly must prove him­self as no soft touch. The alter­na­tive is to be bru­talised and like­ly raped. The lan­guage bar­ri­er is a ver­i­ta­ble wall of incom­pre­hen­sion, fur­ther iso­lat­ing the young man in a ter­ri­fy­ing way. Few sub­ti­tles are pro­vid­ed for audi­ence under­stand­ing, allow­ing the view­er to also sub­merge them­selves in the chaos.

Direc­tor Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire trans­forms mate­r­i­al which might oth­er­wise be pedes­tri­an with a dev­as­tat­ing­ly inti­mate eye, using rov­ing track­ing shots and hand­held close-ups to seam­less­ly assim­i­late into the vicious world he cap­tures. Spe­cial atten­tion is paid to the the bod­ies of the inmate and his fel­lows, focus­ing the cam­era between mus­cled shoul­der blades – on side pro­files, bruised knuck­les, tat­toos, shaved heads.

In sev­er­al sequences, Sauvaire fol­lows the rub-down of the fighter’s mus­cles, mar­ry­ing a homo­erot­ic ten­sion with incip­i­ent vio­lence. There are stab­bings and rape in this prison, but there is also a clan­des­tine com­mu­ni­ty in its gyms, in its trad­ing of cig­a­rettes and small-time gam­bling and in its shar­ing of stick and poke tattoos.

The thread of eroti­cism and ten­der­ness is most evi­dent in Billy’s rela­tion­ship with Thai trans woman Fame (Porn­chanok Mabklang), a beau­ti­ful fel­low inmate. She and Bil­ly form a sim­ple but lov­ing rela­tion­ship, and she becomes a bea­con of hope for him as he nav­i­gates this oth­er­wise bleak ordeal. The woman who plays Fame is a non-actor. Much of A Prayer Before Dawn was shot on loca­tion in Thai­land, with a cast com­pris­ing real ex-gang mem­bers and crim­i­nals. This affords it a nat­u­ral­is­tic inside-the-prison-walls approach, and the self-assured direct­ing is even more impres­sive giv­en the film’s mod­est budget.

Beyond the macho lim­i­ta­tions of the usu­al hard-case type, Joe Cole trans­mits a coiled hurt that’s intrigu­ing. Although we know noth­ing of his his­to­ry, his bursts of vio­lence are as nat­ur­al a method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to him as polite con­ver­sa­tion is for oth­ers. He seems dri­ven less by mal­ice than he does a total inabil­i­ty to deal with life in any oth­er way. This makes him a fig­ure of empa­thy beyond his ani­mal­is­tic ten­den­cies. A Prayer Before Dawn is a remark­ably lived-in and poet­ic piece of genre film­mak­ing, cast­ing an non­judge­men­tal eye on the machis­mo of the crim­i­nal underclass.