As with his first two films Our Day Will Come and The World Is Yours, Romain Gavras’ Athena is a work whose style trumps its substance—but oh what magnificently fearsome style it is! A French drama of blistering intensity and immediacy that begins with one of the most bravura tracking shots in contemporary cinema history, and then manages to maintain that virtuosity as it barrels headlong into anarchic chaos, Gavras’ third feature (Sept. 9 in theaters; Sept. 23 on Netflix) is explosive in every sense of the word. An expression of class-warfare fury, folly and futility that, no matter its occasional narrative thinness, achieves the operatic highs for which it strives, it’s a visceral tour de force that lands with the impact of a shotgun blast to the chest.
Named after the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, whose moniker also blesses the Parisian housing project that is its setting, Athena strives for the classical with every jaw-dropping extended take and crescendo of choral singing. An act of pure aesthetic showmanship, Gavras’ latest (co-written with Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly, whose Les Misérables is an incendiary kindred spirit) wastes no time with context, opening with a close-up of decorated French soldier Abdel (Dali Benssalah) as he addresses the media about the murder of his 13-year-old brother, whose death at the alleged hands of cops has been caught on viral video and is a continuation of a recent spate of law enforcement brutality in and around the apartment blocks that Abdel calls home. Before he can finish his remarks, however, Gavras pans across the throngs of journalists to fixate on Abdel’s live-wire sibling Karim (Sami Slimane), who tosses a Molotov cocktail into the police station and, in doing so, lights the fuse of a city primed to detonate.
Detonate it most certainly does, and Athena immediately dives headfirst into the resultant pandemonium, with Gavras’ gaze—aided by stellar director of photography Matias Boucard—refusing to turn away from his subjects for sustained minutes on end. Following Karim as he guides his allies’ siege of police headquarters, ordering them to steal a giant safe full of guns and commandeering a van to take it back to Athena where he’s greeted by cheering supporters ready to take up arms, Gavras’ camera bobs and weaves, paces and races, glides and soars with a dexterity that’s nothing short of astonishing. Entering, exiting and crossing physical spaces with seemingly impossible fluidity, it’s an introductory salvo of ingenuity and urgency: highly attuned to these characters’ formidable frenzy, and orchestrated at a breakneck pace that barely allows viewers to catch their breath—much less consider how the director logistically pulled off some of his stunning cinematographic feats.
Athena, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is an archetypal tragedy of grieving brothers caught on opposite sides of a conflagration that neither can control—and which threatens to consume them both. A long-haired Che Guevara for the modern age, the steely-eyed Karim is the de facto general of a guerrilla army of Black and Arab men whom he inspires to riot in the name of his fallen sibling. With terrifying stoicism that only cracks during a brief glance at his murdered brother’s portrait, Karim is a figure of imposing ferocity, and Gavras casts him as the embodiment of the denigrated and disenfranchised’s simmering anger. Karim’s brother’s slaying is the tipping-point catalyst for this urban eruption, and the film immerses itself in the smoky, fiery carnage that ensues, embellished by the fireworks-style flares that Karim and company use as weapons against invading federal forces, and pockmarked by clashes that are as spontaneous as they are vicious.
On the other side of Athena’s divide is Abdel, who puts his own mourning on hold in order to try to calm the hostilities that threaten to demolish his community, his home, and his family. As with Karim—and, also, the duo’s drug-and gun-running half-brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), who receives relatively short shrift throughout—Abdel is a two-dimensional type who functions as more of a pawn than a fully realized protagonist. Nonetheless, Abdel and Karim’s diverging desires for peace and war are suitable engines for Gavras’ astounding artistry. Whether racing alongside Karim before literally leaping into the combative fray with him (and, afterward, pausing to revel in his fleeting slow-motion scream of triumph), or marching behind Abdel as he desperately searches the courtyard crowds for his militaristic sibling, Gavras’ direction is off-the-charts muscular and dexterous, repeatedly finding new ways to wow without ever sacrificing the material’s maniacal momentum.
Between fashioning Athena as a sprawling fortress with de facto ramparts (which officers must eventually scale with ladders), the sight of a cigarette-craving local on a white steed, brilliant flares zooming through the night sky like arrows, or armored cops raising their shields in unison as a means of protecting themselves against falling projectiles, Athena imagines timely French sociopolitical tensions in medieval-warfare terms. Regardless of Abdel’s attempts to stave off calamity, his sister intones, “the war has started,” and Gavras, Belkeddar and Ly’s script envisions that civil conflict as an apocalyptic one that no one can survive unscathed, including—potentially—a green cop named Jérôme (Anthony Bajon) whom Karim takes hostage. Still, channeling the energy of his best music videos (for M.I.A., Kanye West, Jamie XX and others), the director favors you-are-there dynamism over preaching, proving more interested in tapping into the enflamed vein of this multicultural French nation than diagnosing it with clinical nuance and sobriety.
Though less overtly political than those of his father Costa-Gavras (whose Z remains a rightful political-thriller landmark), Gavras’ films have always been fascinated by the directionless rage of the marginalized and oppressed, even when they haven’t known precisely what to say about it. With Athena, his characters—despite Slimane’s magnetic debut turn—frustratingly come across as stock devices. Yet there’s newfound determination and verve to his storytelling, as if he now understands that the madness to which he’s attracted can only conclude in catastrophe. In this scorching vision of revolt, revenge and ruination, wrath begets blindness which leads, invariably, to self-immolation. Annihilation has rarely seemed so bleak, and so beautiful.
