Venice Film Festival 2022: Athena
Romain Gavras’ bravura third feature, Athena, is an incendiary exploration of police brutality in the Paris banlieues
An incendiary exploration of police brutality told through the eyes of the victim Idir’s three brothers – lauded military man Abdel, small-time crime boss Mokhtar, and Karim, the steely-eyed leader of his banlieue Athena’s guerrilla resistance – Romain Gavras’ Athena is wild and alive with the politics of aesthetic. It is found in its opening salvo: a delirious, 11-minute single shot in which a police station is ransacked and kids freewheel motorbikes alongside a stolen armed van. It is in its operatic cadence and the breath-taking chiaroscuro of artillery fire as the banlieue residents fight back against a police siege; in its long tracking shots and insistence on staying with the trouble; in a cinematic plane that moves not only across but up and down, fully inhabiting the dimensional scale of violence. In a world where police brutality and white supremacy are captured and replayed ad nauseam on our screens, Athena considers how the subsequent revolution might not only be televised, but rendered electric and sublime.
It reaches so close to perfection, held up only by a bizarre narrative choice that occurs midway, where the responsibility for Idir’s death is placed not in the hands of the police but a far-right group attempting to sow social discord. Generously, this U-turn from Gavras and screenwriter Ladj Ly (director of the critically acclaimed Les Miserables) could be read as a deliberate mirroring of the police industrial complex and the resurgence of the far right, a collapse of the illusory boundaries that exist between the two. Less generously, however, it muddies the water, somewhat undermining the righteousness of the uprising and the clarity of its political critique.
Yet for all this needless sensationalism, there is still so much force to Athena’s anger, so much determined attention given to the inevitable brutality of law and order. What lingers is the dynamism of a flag blooming like a deep-sea creature, clenched in the fists of France’s colonial legacies; a barricade of concrete and white goods silhouetted as the mythic tower blocks of Athena unfold below. Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Romain Gavras. They are all telling the same story. Here it is again: the devastation of oppression, and the exhilaration of revolt.
Athene had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival and will be on Netflix from 23 Sep