Athena

dir: Romain Gavras

2022

This film has pretty much the greatest and most thrilling first ten minutes of any film I’ve ever seen or that’s ever been made. If there’s an issue, a serious issue, it’s that the other 90 or so minutes that follow aren’t as compelling as that opening.

It’s amazing, and intense, and a masterpiece of coordination, choreography and cinematography. Of course it would seem like downhill from there.

I can’t overstate enough how amazing it is: It opens with a young chap with a military haircut talking to assembled reporters and rows of cops about the unfortunate death of a teenage boy at the hands of police officers. This is in front of a cop station, and there is a large crowd of angry people, mostly youths, all from the same housing complex, from which the film gets its name. Athena is made up of towers, the kinds of towers that here we call housing commission flats; in Britain council estates; the States call them projects. In France I think they’re called banlieue, which sounds ominous but really just means “outlying suburb”. You know, where they send all the poor immigrants to live.

Just as Soldier Boy speaks to the media, urging calm and restraint in the face of police brutality, one of his other brother’s, Karim (Sami Slimane, utterly magnificent) chooses to strongly disagree. He launches a Molotov cocktail at the police, freaking everyone out, but starting off a plan that clearly he’s been working on since he heard about the youngest brother’s death.

Karim commands other young chaps from Athena in their attack on the police station, stealing weapons, body armour and a police van in order to cart back their hard won loot from the pigs back to Athena.

All of this happens at breakneck speed, and in (what looks like) one glorious single take that ends with the “heroes” standing at the ramparts of one of the towers of the complex, daring the cops to attack, as the film’s title is revealed.

By this point, you kinda feel like it’s their battle, and they’re going to win it.

Then you remember, a disorganised army of French black and North African Muslims, mostly armed with fireworks, versus a racist police force with lots of guns? Of course the Empire wins in the end, but how are we going to get there, to an end we suspect / fear, but which we know is coming?

Karim is beyond being reasoned with, is beyond fear, cannot be bought or threatened, and he will bring down the towers themselves in his pursuit of those who killed his youngest brother Idris. We sense that it’s not just his outrage at the murder of his brother; that this is more like a final breaking point after a life lived replete with racist provocations on the part of a state that sees them all, at the Athena towers, as criminal scum and terrorists, unfit for polite society.

Of course the soldier brother Abdel (Dali Benssalah), who by dint of his job we guess naturally sides with the state, isn’t going to see eye to eye with Karim (who has transcended petty mortal concerns, his anger having elevated him beyond logic or the threat of repercussions). The reality is that once the cops start trying to crack down on the protestors / attackers / rioters etc (pick your euphemism), they aren’t going to differentiate between him and the others, no matter how many medals he has for fighting against Islamic separatists in Mali. Being, like his brothers, of Algerian descent, they’re all equally guilty in the eyes of the pigs.

So if you thought the conflict between these brothers would be a lot, well, there is no shortage of other brothers to complicate things further. There’s another brother, being Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), who cares not about what happens in the towers, or whether he’s lost a brother. He is a violent drug dealer, and all he cares about is getting his stash, his weapons and his money out of the place which is now surrounded by cops. He has a bunch of large henchmen that he verbally abuses and threatens all the time as they cater to his whims or try to dig through concrete for an escape route.

What fun. For him.

He’s, in his own way, an even bigger problem than the cops who seemingly want to kill everyone. If we have a main character (we kinda don’t), it is that we keep watching Abdel negotiating between his various brothers trying to keep everyone alive and trying to stop the cops from killing everyone.

Of course Karim isn’t looking to de-escalate. He wants to force the cops to give up the ones that killed his brother, and the only way he can think of is to kidnap a cop and threaten to kill him until the corrupt cops are delivered to him.

Is it a shitty plan? Karim’s fury is so palpable, so frightening, that you can feel heat radiating off of the screen, so I don’t have the courage to say that. It is, perhaps, not very well thought out. The corrupt cops, well, they just killed a kid for no reason, so how much will they care if a cop dies in their place? Their fate would be pretty obvious at the hands of Karim and the mob. The other cops, looking for any excuse to kill Karim and everyone like him, would happily use the kidnapped cop’s death as further justification for cracking down on the already oppressed. As various characters hurtle through apartments in the tower, we see the news that’s reporting on the uprising, and it’s generally right wing commentary saying what scum the banlieue residents are and how whatever is going to happen to them is unfortunate but necessary and their fault anyway.

Those television voices are also floating an idea, which I feel is one of the flick’s massive missteps, that it wasn’t the cops who killed the young boy in the first place: it was right wing activists pretending to be cops who killed him, hoping to provoke riots and uprisings and such in order to… I dunno, help right wing candidates in elections maybe? Or maybe they just wanted to kill a kid?

I can’t really see the point of this, but it keeps rearing its head throughout the film. Karim doesn’t care. He doesn’t care who did, he wants them brought to the Athena, so he can deliver justice upon them.

If there is any hope that justice will prevail, or that the wrongs will be righted, this isn’t that film. However justified Karim’s rage, however well-meaning Abdel’s actions trying to save everyone, even the terrified cop, however understandable the crim brother’s actions, no-one’s going to be rewarded, because nothing’s really going to change the fact that the racism is woven into not only the fabric of the state, but in the wiring of the buildings themselves.

If the director and screenwriter are positing that there is a solution (they aren’t) it’s that there is only one way, and that is to destroy everything. Or at least there’s only one way a situation like this is going to end. I definitely don’t support such a reading, but it’s hard to see it any other way. It’s not just bleak, it’s pretty devastating, no matter how much energy the makers pour into the enterprise. Every few years across France there are uprisings like this, less revolutions and more groups of people screaming that they’re not going to take it anymore, and they don’t care if they die as long as they take some property and police along with them. I can’t claim to completely understand it, but I can read the articles about it, or watch segments on Foreign Correspondent where fully kitted up French cops in Marseille or Nice scream abuse and arrest young people wearing t-shirts and little else in places identical to the Athena, all in the service of the French version of the War On Drugs and Unsavory Foreigner Types.

It’s a horrible problem, with no solution, but Gavras, son of legendary Greek director Costa Gavras, can at least give voice to that rage, and craft a film where characters who care about each other make bad decisions that lead to worse ones until the only solution is blowing the whole place up.

Imagine, if you will, a flick like one of the Nolan Batman movies (without, you know, Batman or any hero whatsoever in it), where the villain is Gotham City, and the solution is burning it to the ground, and that’s what actually happens in the end. What sort of a message would people take away from such a flick? Give me all the rewards and cocaine now for thinking of it, thanks.

I would say the ending shocked me, but considering the way I felt while watching the flick, I can’t really imagine a different outcome, much as I wish they could find one. It’s one of the definite films of the year for me, except for the two tragic missteps that it makes. Also, fan that I am of the film, nothing really feels as great as those opening 10 minutes. Long sections of the flick drag, to use the technical term, like a motherfucker, as characters we know aren’t going anywhere continue to not go anywhere, just very slowly.

It's so well filmed, though, so great in its evocation of an actual asymmetrical “battle” in a building, with Karim as a supreme general who’s every order is followed so brilliantly, well, at least for a while. It’s a visual treat, though very stressful, with a great use of music too.

Also, the Karim character deserves 14 films in his honour at least. His rage enough would be able to power Ukraine this winter after all the destruction there that stupid Putin has wrought. I can’t wait to see this actor’s next performances. Cannot wait.

Athena. It will leave you with a burning sensation that will take a while to fade.

8 times it’s really hard to say who “wins” in the end out of 10

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“When they strike, we strike back. When they kill, we’ll kill.” – no need to stand on ceremony on my account, have at them - Athena