A Prayer Before Dawn (2017)
A punch in the gut, literally
It’s been a long time since I had such a hard time watching a movie. Nonetheless, the gruelling and detailed storytelling of Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s A Prayer Before Dawn presents a very disorienting and dislocating experience which makes you question a lot of things about life. Adapted from the English boxer William “Billy” Moore’s memoir about the three years he spent in Chiang Mai and Klong Prem prisons of Thailand, A Prayer Before Dawn takes us through the boxer’s struggle to maintain his career in fighting while suffering from heroin addiction.
Played by Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders fame), Billy is arrested in Thailand for possession of drugs and sent to prison. His cell, about 25ft by 15ft, is nowhere near big enough for the 50 plus prisoners locked inside. There are no beds, so everyone lays on the floor with an old rag in between, and if the man beside you isn’t dead, chances are he would have hung himself by next morning. Aside from his skin colour, Billy stands out from his de rigueur shirtless inmates as he does not have any tattoos on his body. Initially, he finds himself stuck in a hell-hole, literally, and is very precarious — often fighting for his space. But as the movie progresses, he demonstrates his fighting skills and establishes that he is a kick-boxer. This becomes the commodity which can potentially save him. Soon enough, Billy’s life goes full circle, as he has to fight for the money he needs to buy drugs, the same reason he ended up in prison and had to pick up fighting again.
The movie is outright upsetting, and made with the good intention to evoke panic and alarm in you. It has been setup wonderfully, you are placed in the world of the central character, seeing through his eyes. There is very little English dialogue in the film, but there is an awful lot of non-English, non-subtitled dialogue. The movie wants you to understand only what Billy understands. The intent here is to not sugarcoat or gloss over anything — they want to show you the gang rapes, they want you to look at people committing suicide and they want you to feel the fear of losing your life to the spiral of drug addiction. Even after giving a lot of thought, I haven’t figured out the exact technical ploys used by the director to produce the effects he did, but there were times where I could feel the smell of the piss and vomit emanating from the screen.
That being said, a lot of credit for the movie goes to its sound design. Not just the presence of it, but the absence of it as well. In key moments, like some of the initial fights, there is no sound. We only hear the punches and the grunts, and some hustling from the people watching. Talking about the fight scenes, they are just brutal. Shot in extremely long and close-up takes, we see every drop of spit leaving the mouth and every drop of blood leaving the body. There isn’t a single second during the fights when the camera moves away from the action. We are made to watch the whole bout, round after round, as the camera hovers from one fighter’s shoulder to the other’s.
Joe Cole has done an amazing job, giving it all out there. He blends so well with the real ex-prisoner cast of the film, which was shot in real Thai prisons. At no point does the movie feel condescending or sensationalised at all, in-fact, it is very violent and realistic — encouraging you to take it at face and believe in the reality of everything you are seeing.
At the end, one might ask — What is the point of the story? Well there isn’t, and there wasn’t supposed to be any. It’s just pure, unadulterated experiential cinema. The reason why I wrote about this movie is not because it breaks any new ground, its the authenticity and delivery of the story which is so rarely found in biopics compelled me to.
