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| Director Romain Gavras |
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| Ouassini Embarek on the set |
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| cinematographer Matias Boucard |
ATHENA B France (99 mi) 2022 ‘Scope d: Romain Gavras
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors. —Simone Weil opening paragraph from her essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 1945, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force | The Anarchist Library
Gavras is the youngest son of renowned Greek-French film director Konstantin Costa-Gavras, whose political thriller Z (1969) was ripped from the headlines, shot like a documentary, and listed by Time magazine as one of "The 15 Best Political Films of All Time: The Votes Are In". Like father like son, this is another blisteringly intense experience recalling the French suburban riots of October 2005 that originated in the mostly North African immigrant banlieue region of Clichy-sous-Bois, an eastern suburb of Paris, after the death of two young boys who had been escaping the police, eventually spreading to 274 cities and towns nationwide, triggering the worst rioting in France for 40 years, lasting over three entire weeks, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency, resulting in the burning of nearly 9,000 vehicles and the arrests of 2888 individuals, as dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire. The French courts eventually cleared the police (French court clears police over Paris deaths that triggered ...), while the conditions that fueled the uprisings in the banlieues remain largely unchanged, ('Nothing's changed': 10 years after French riots, banlieues ...), as the same bleak hopelessness prevails, and the promise to provide racial and economic equity has abysmally failed, with poor education, rampant youth unemployment, and violent confrontations continuing from a heavy-handed police presence, often involving tear gas brigades, with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls saying in Le Monde that there was a “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in France. Unlike the widely heralded Kerner Commission following urban riots in the United States during the 60’s that revealed “Two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened), or the Scarman Report in Great Britain following the Brixton Riots of 1981, which identified “complex political, social, and economic factors” that created a “disposition towards violent protest,” but did not explicitly condemn police racism and denied that “institutional racism” even existed, with the recommendations ignored by the Thatcher government, there has been no official national debate on the crisis in France, as no commission of experts and legislators was convened to analyze the riots, resulting in a massive failure to address ongoing racial and religious discrimination. Making matters worse, newspaper and television reports often depict these rioters as “violent” or “thugs,” though artists are often at the forefront of the protests, yet somehow they fail to address the circumstances that ignited these outbreaks. What we’re left with, then, to fill the political void, is the arts community providing their own challenging vision, with Gavras using cinema as a theater of provocation, hoping to advance public arguments and discussions on the separate and unequal disparities in the the banlieues, where hopelessness and civil unrest continue to plague the nation. Shot south of Paris in Évry-Courcouronnes, in the Parc aux Lièvres housing project (aka “the Rabbit Park”), where around 80% was shot with an IMAX camera, the last one available when shooting started (there are only around 50 in the world), this follows in the footsteps of the Mathieu Kassovitz film LA HAINE (1995), Jean-François Richet’s MA 6-T VA CRACK-ER (1997), Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015), and more recently Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables (2019), all films shot in the suburban banlieue projects, where trust with authorities has never been lower, as residents are routinely stigmatized as criminals, where racial tensions with police are continually on high alert, using raw language and an ultra-realistic cinéma vérité shooting style to convey the immediacy of each moment, as these are tinderboxes continually on the verge of erupting into a firestorm of violence.
Gavras got his start making advertisements and directing music videos, and this is largely a choreographed movie, much like storyboards in movies of old, where sequences were carefully constructed ahead of time and rehearsed for months before shooting began. Matias Boucard’s cinematography is the star of the show, easily the biggest single takeaway from the film, and not just the harmonious synchronicity of the tracking shots, which are utterly spectacular, but the sheer realism in capturing the impassioned outrage from the collective anger in the projects. Reminiscent of Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera kinetics and complicated long takes in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), the opening shot is a doozy, an electrifying 11-minute tracking shot that swivels on a dime from following a solemn police press conference, quickly turning into John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), as all hell breaks loose with a sudden mob insurgency when they ransack the police station stealing weapons, gear, and a police van before making an electrifying escape back into the protected walls of the Athena projects (named, appropriately enough, after the goddess of war), with armed residents standing guard atop the towering fortress awaiting the inevitable police response. Written by Gavras, Ladj Ly, and Elias Belkeddar, it’s a Greek tragedy along the lines of The Iliad, an alliance of Greek cities that eventually prevail in sacking Troy, with a SWAT team of police in riot gear representing the massive force of the Greeks against the besieged banlieue fortress of the protected city of Troy, viewed as a nightmarish Armageddon vision of intensely staged combat where in the end all humanity feels lost, as there is no reconciliation, only blind hatred. This gritty thriller follows three brothers of French-Algerian descent whose lives are thrown into chaos following the brutal beating of their youngest 13-year old brother who was left for dead, with video footage pointing to the police, where the outraged community is a powder keg of unleashed fury ready to explode. Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated French soldier who fought in Iraq and in the former African colony of Mali, now collaborating with the police, whose calm demeanor is in stark contrast to the incendiary emotions of Karim (Sami Slimane), the charismatic youth leader who aggressively starts a campaign of guerilla warfare against the police, while the oldest is Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug dealer more concerned with hiding his stash of drugs and weapons from the impending police raids than assisting either of his brothers. Karim despises the fact that Abdel refuses to take up arms and fight the police, angrily raging “You’re a military whore for France,” while Moktar constantly urges Abdel to protect his own skin above anything else. These existential, post-imperialist choices reflect the dilemma of Arab and African French immigrants who are urged to assimilate, yet find opportunities glaringly limited by poverty, powerlessness, and racial divisions, where justice is something they never see, with absolutely no trust in the police or governmental authorities, where a lingering sentiment refuses to accept them as being French, instead associating them with criminal or terrorist behavior, where they are literally viewed as the scourge of the earth.
The knock on this film is that it accentuates the stereotypes, with zero female presence, making little effort to establish any interior character development while also failing to provide social context, though much like the United States, police killings of civilians have dominated headlines in France for years, with the film addressing a prevalent lack of hope in the post-modern world, motivating Gavras to present a collapsing world that seems to revel in an unfolding civil war which sends shock waves across the nation, with television reports of mosques burning and right-wing attacks across the country. Driven by the visceral allure of Pontecorvo’s revolutionary The Battle of Algiers (1965) and George Miller’s sensationalized Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the aesthetic is an adrenaline rush on overdrive, using drones and swooping crane shots with no pauses or moments to breathe, as it’s simply a non-stop assault to the senses, an all-consuming experience in real time that continually immerses viewers into the center of the action, accentuated by the reverberating music of Benoit Heitz, aka GENER8ION, ATHENA - Netflix Soundtrack - GENER8ION YouTube (35:46), like a Greek chorus commenting on the action, with the camera jumping back and forth in expressing points of view, where the bloodthirsty allure of revolution becomes an apocalyptic day of reckoning of Biblical proportions. As the various attacks unfold, it also includes a tormented family melodrama, with brother turning against brother, elevated to a mythical scale as they barricade themselves into the bowels of this concrete monstrosity, where much of it is shot in darkened corridors where it was hard to tell what was happening, resembling the chaos of a war zone, entangled in a perplexing labyrinth where there are no good options, each seemingly a dead end, while also mysteriously sheltered inside is a wanted sociopathic terrorist, Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), who has gone into hiding. At some point in the ensuing chaos a young police officer named Jérôme (Anthony Bajon) is separated from his unit and captured, immediately turned into a hostage used for negotiations, demanding the names of the three policemen involved, with Karim refusing to believe the police report that the killers may not have been police officers, but far-right extremists posing as the police in a deliberate attempt to incite a race riot. The same nation that gave us liberté, égalité, and fraternité is also the nation of Le Pen, the hijab ban, and horrific atrocities in Algeria, where the colonial fallout is still being felt. While Gavras explores themes of racism, violence, and social injustice on a grand scale, he combines all facets of photography, editing, and the musical score with a potency that is perfectly synchronized, culminating in an adrenaline-charged tragedy of operatic dimensions, where a nihilistic fatalism devalues everything that exists, as freedom is a lost cause, recalling the finale sequence of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1995), where this is simply a blitzkrieg of annihilation, leaving no room for empathy or reflection. The reveal in the final postscript may be the most divisive aspect of the film, a flashback to what sparked the outrage, yet it’s handled with a deft precision, adding a sense of foreboding for the future, as cataclysmic divisions in France are only exacerbated by increasing political power of the far-right National Rally, whose nationalist, anti-immigration policies repeatedly connect immigration to Islamic terrorism, making any potential racial reconciliation impossible. This deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with the best sound systems, as much of the visual style was designed for the big screen, much like Hollywood action movies, but unfortunately it spent little time in theaters and was immediately streamed on Netflix, which is disheartening, as you can’t help wondering how that happened, as it seems like a huge mistake. The film is dedicated to DJ Mehdi, a French hip hop and house music producer, and the memory of Bernard Moussa Gomis.
