Incredible similarity: Netflix's Athena protesters. Credit: Kourtrjameuf Kourtrajme/Netflix
Netflix viewers who lazily browsed the service last week might be shocked if they clicked on a movie called Athena. The title, referring to a fictional residential complex in Paris, might suggest something noble and resonant, but this snarling thriller, which combines intricately choreographed action scenes with social resonance, will make viewers wince and won't let go. until the credits roll.
However, this is not escapist entertainment. Instead, Athena is the latest and perhaps the most resonant in a new sub-genre of French cinema – films that try to cope with the tensions of life in a country that seems to be sliding into civil war.
Athena is not the first painting dedicated to this. In 1995, French director Mathieu Kassovitz made one of the most talked about films of the century. La Haine (or “The Hate”) is a rousing black-and-white drama about urban life in Paris's infamous, rugged suburbs, the so-called “suburbs,” and the simmering chaos that seems bound to flare up after a young immigrant is attacked and given seriously injured while in police custody.
And yet, although the picture ends with a shocking moment of violence and the inevitable beginning of social disintegration, this is not a movie about a war between police and suburbanites; instead, it's a sadder and more wistful narrative than that. The French Prime Minister at the time, Alain Juppe, arranged for a mandatory viewing of his cabinet to familiarize them with the social realities it reflected. Laen, in his words, was “a beautiful work of cinematic art that can help us become more aware of some of the realities.”
Whatever the purpose of Juppe's trip to the cinema for his fellow politicians, it was not successful. Three decades later, social unrest and inequality not only persisted in France, but worsened dramatically, with countless examples of discrimination and violence, usually directed against the unemployed immigrants who make up much of urban life in the core areas. countries. And last week, when 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was shot dead by a police officer, tensions escalated into an orgy of violence that was directed not only at his killer or the police, but at anyone who looked.
At the time of writing, there have been six nights of destruction and chaos, with over 1,300 arrests made, 1,350 cars set on fire and up to 40,000 police officers deployed in an attempt to contain the unrest. Now it seems like he's burned out for the moment, but everyone involved, from the police to those who fought against them, knows that Merzouk's death, which led to the arrest of the officer involved and the charge of “premeditated murder by authority figure,” was the spark , which launched a particularly powerful powder keg.
Laen was an international success: Kassovitz used aspects of the gangster picture and black comedy to make his dark message of social unrest acceptable (he also introduced the now global superstar Vincent Cassel to a wider audience). Since its release, films such as Jacques Audiard's Dipal and Laj Ly's 2019 crime film Les Misérables have chronicled the realities of lower-class suburban life, where violence is a way of life and where the chances of escape seem slim for residents. everything but the impossible.
Scene from Athena Credit: Netflix
When French President Emmanuel Macron saw Les Misérables, he was as alarmed by the message as he was when Juppé saw Laen decades ago and told his government that they should “hurry up to find ideas and act to improve living conditions in the suburbs.” “. This, unfortunately, was back in 2019, and no matter what decisions he and his government came up with, they turned out to be useless.
However, if Macron and his administration had logged into their Netflix accounts late last year and watched the amazing Athena, co-written by Romain Gavras and co-written by Lee, they could be forgiven for bursting out in shock and horror. hands and believed that their work in the government was doomed. Compared to Gavras' painting, “En”, “Les Misérables” and the rest look polite and well-mannered.
It's a spectacular action on par with The Raid or Children of Men, combining brilliantly choreographed violence and mayhem with a social message suggesting that France is in a state of constant civil war.
Fiction versus reality: a protester in Athens (left) and a firefighter in front of a burning car in Paris in 2023 (right) Photo: Netflix and REUTERS/Stephanie Lecoq
Gavras is a 41-year-old filmmaker who has made three feature films so far and also collaborates with Jay-Z, Mark Ronson, and Kanye West, who hasn't disgraced himself yet, on music videos. He is said to be in a relationship with British pop star Dua Lipa and has quickly established himself as one of the brightest and most interesting directors working today. However, his ability to create a brilliantly original and captivating cinematic world owes something to his father, the Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras, who made his reputation with political thrillers like 1970s Z and 1972 State of Siege. before moving on to Hollywood movies like Jessica Lange's car music box and Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta's thriller Mad City.
However, his son was not interested in slavishly following in his father's footsteps. In an interview he gave to The Guardian late last year, shortly after Athena premiered with success at the Venice Film Festival, he said: “I watched Tarkovsky too young. All masterpieces, too young. My dad has been feeding me them since I was seven years old. So my rebellion at the age of 12 or 13 was against all of that. I said that I hate Tarkovsky and that my favorite film is Die Hard.
Athena 2022 //France 2023 pic.twitter.com/TZ1MzC84v7
— Modewme (@modewme) July 1, 2023
A big part of Athena's success is that it completely abandons the expectations of social cinema in favor of something more operatic and grandiose. Revolves around the death of a young man, presumably at the hands of the police, and the different views of his three surviving brothers: one, a former army officer, wants to maintain the status quo as much as possible; the second, a drug dealer, sees an opportunity to make money and exploit the chaos; and the third seeks to lead the suburbanites into battle with the police in an attempt to get justice for his brother – that's what gives the film resonance and narrative drive.
Purely as part of filmmaking, Athena is a resounding success. It opens with a bravura one-take shot in which a press conference at a police station quickly escalates into Molotov cocktail violence. It seems almost unbelievable that Gavras was able to capture scenes of intricate choreography with the confidence and bravura that the film exhibits: by comparison, virtually everything that has come out of Hollywood in the past decade seems tame and well-mannered.
This is also done completely for real, on camera, without CGI. As Gavras explained, “We rehearsed the entire film for almost two months, as if you were rehearsing a play or an opera, with a small camera, the main actors pretending to have fireworks around them, and the extras to see the dance between the camera and and the actors and the rhythm.” There is no CGI in the film, we do everything for real. The planning, oddly enough, was almost military and very precise in order to create havoc in front of the camera.”
This plausibility, which, in a strange irony, meant that Yassin Buzeru, a lawyer who plays a small role in Athena like himself, now represents the family of Nahel Merzouk, however, should not serve a purely realistic view. drama. In an interview with CNN, Gavras bluntly suggested that he was not making a film that evokes contemporary associations: “We wanted to bring an aspect of Greek tragedy into it; almost like a myth about the near future. The action is now in France, but it could be the Trojan War, medieval wars, maybe a war in the future with Elon Musk on the moon.
He describes Athena not in terms of a reflection of today's situation, but as “the innermost pain of the brotherhood, when their pain, rage and sorrow will be shed on the districts, and then on the whole country”, and rejects any thought that that he is personally passing judgment on the situation in France at the moment. “I really don't think we have a moral responsibility,” he said. “I think we have a responsibility to our beliefs and to cinema.”
Photo: Netflix and Benjamin Girett/Bloomberg
What a mockery of other serious filmmakers who see their films as a much-needed social purpose, Gavras suggested that “Sometimes—and Hollywood does—there's self-aggrandizement when they think, 'Oh, cinema is moving forward.' to change the world for the better. There were a lot of movies that tried to do that and the world was just going to shit and shit.”
If anyone is watching Athena and hoping to find some message that will bring clarity and hope to the desperate current situation, there will only be disappointment. The film's final twist, which removes the moral responsibility for the violence from the police, is a particularly dark part of the narrative, suggesting that all of the atrocities we've seen over the previous 90 minutes were based on the most tragic of them all. misunderstandings.
It's only fitting that Athena was funded and released by Netflix. As Gavras commented, “The French studio wouldn't give me the budget for this and would probably push me to bring in big actors – and I think it's better to have new faces.” It's also likely that they would have nitpicked both the sheer scale on which the film is shot – the massive battle scene in the middle of the picture seems like something out of Hollywood's most lavishly budgeted epic – and Gavras' refusal to offer a traditional moral line. .
The most charismatic and inspiring character, Sami Slimana's Karim, is also an anarchist who, like Heath Ledger's Joker, “just wants to see the world burn”, even as he demands the heads of the people who killed his brother. (Gavras eloquently commented in an interview with the Guardian that “the only good superhero is Batman because he has no superpowers, he's just a rich vigilante.”)
It's currently unknown if Athena is really experiencing a surge in viewership on Netflix as viewers try to discern the difference between life and art, and Gavras over the past week has not commented on the uncanny similarities between his painting and what is currently happening across France.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that he says that this is nothing more than a sharp and visceral account of the civil war, it cannot but have a frightening resonance with events literally torn from today's headers. Athena was critically acclaimed at its premiere in Venice last year, many of whom praised its topical associations. Now it seems like nothing more than an intensified operatic warning: a declaration that France is teetering on the brink of chaos and that, if left unchecked, it will face a fiery Ragnarok.
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