Though at the time of this writing, the 2023 riots in France have decreased in intensity, it proves downright eerie how much Romain Gavras’s Netflix released Athena predicted the civil unrest seen mere weeks ago. On June 27th, French police officers unjustly murdered a 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a French boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, as he was driving a reportedly suspicious vehicle. Protests initially began in front of police headquarters, only to soon escalate into riots that set the nation ablaze, particularly after video evidence contradicted the testimonies of the police officers involved. The events recall a number of protests against police brutality worldwide, particularly the George Floyd protests that began in 2020 at the start of lockdown measures in the wake of COVID-19. For France however, civil unrest is almost an annual recurrence, partly because its police force is one of the most brutal in Europe, having been condemned five times in the last six years alone by the European Court of Human Rights over violations. Romain Gavras willfully channeled the public’s frustration with their supposed protectors into his incendiary sophomore feature Athena.
Released on Netflix in 2022, Athena is Greek tragedy, action drama, and revolutionary cinema all rolled into one, following the aftermath of the murder of 13-year-old Algerian-French Idir at the hands of police officers. The tension largely surrounds Idir’s three older brothers and their wars with one another as a result of their opposing allegiances. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), who opens the film, is a soldier intent on quelling the inevitable civil unrest in spite of his brotherly affiliation to the deceased. Karim (Sami Slimane), the youngest of the surviving brothers who mobilizes the banlieues, leads the militaristic resistance movement against the police, his aim being for the cops to divulge the names of those who killed Idir. Finally, there’s Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), who cares less about the escalating civil war and more about getting his guns and drugs out of the banlieue prior to Karim’s militarization. Co-written by Gavras, Elias Belkeddar and Les Misérables filmmaker Ladj Ly (also inspired by the 2005 Paris riots), Athena is a relentless pressure cooker waiting to burst at the seems until finally, it does.
‘Athena’ Features Some Jaw-Dropping Filmmaking
There’s no talking about Athena without discussing its opening shot. The words “visually stunning” get thrown around a lot, but Athena receives special kudos for its long takes, even in the era of digital filmmaking where audience members have had the privilege of seeing Tom Cruise perform a real-life HALO jump on the big screen. It’s not just that Athena opens with a 12-minute long take, but that long-take actually starts on the outskirts of a police station, only to turn into a full-on riot in which Karim leads an army of youths to steal police weapons. In the same shot, they hijack a police van to ride back to the banlieue, militarize the tower block, and defiantly rise to the top of their barricades with a closing camera movement that involves the Steadicam-operator attaching himself to a crane in order to get that final epic hero pose.
You’d think that after that stunning 12-minute opening the cast and crew could take a little break but in Gavras’ own words, his camera operator (in this case, South African Myron Mance) “gets bored if there’s no danger”. They maintained this incredible energy throughout the entirety of the film, with further long takes depicting full-on wars between the youths and the police officers as they respectively exchange flares and Molotov cocktails with rubber bullets, flash bangs and tear gas. To add to the grueling nature of the production, 80% of the film was reportedly shot on IMAX, meaning heavier cameras that are much more difficult to maneuver within the tight spaces of a police van, especially when they’re being transferred from moving cars and motorcycles. In Netflix’s making-of featurette, Gavras stated that him and his team only focused on completing one shot a day, creating a strong sense of camaraderie on set for their streamlined goals and accomplishments. Beyond that, it also gives viewers a good idea for just how many jaw-dropping long takes must riddle this unsung technical masterwork.
The Similarities Were So Strong That People Confused the Film for Reality
But it’s not just the technical elements of Gavras and his team that are worthy of praise. None of that would mean anything if it didn’t capture the spirits of millions of youths who fall victim to France’s increasingly brutal police forces. Just last week, in the midst of the riots, French lawmakers agreed to bestow upon police forces the ability to spy on “suspicious” citizens remotely through their tech devices, granting them access to ordinary people’s camera, microphone, and GPS features, the concealment of which could result in punishment in the form of five years imprisonment. It’s a titanic infringement on privacy and civil rights that recalls Batman’s use of the SONAR machine in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that France is a country still plagued by the consequences of its very recent colonial history, chronicled in The Battle of Algiers, particularly in relation to their large, systemically oppressed Algerian population.
With the spirit of French protestors on full display in Romain Gavras’ epic, people online are actually sharing stills from the film en masse believing that they are in fact from the ongoing riots today. Less believable are the stills shared from the zombie car stunts from The Fate of the Furious, but the very fact that these two highly choreographed action shots could garner millions of shares on Twitter under the pretense that they’re real is evidence of the strife present in today’s political climate. Gavras makes every effort to authentically portray the anger on display from the youths, ensuring that their revolutionism is justified and that its characters are wholly sympathetic. Adding to that sympathy are three “save the cat” moments that Gavras seamlessly incorporates into his opener regarding Karim, wherein within the span of one long take, the youth turned militant risks his life to save a friend from police officers, calmly urges a family to evacuate from the banlieue, and offers a cigarette to a beggar, ensuring that his audience knows that we’re following a good person.
Romain Isn’t the Only Gavras Family Member To Champion Revolutionary Cinema
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The name Gavras isn’t necessarily a household one, even among cinephiles, but it should be. Romain Gavras isn’t the first member of the family to dabble in revolutionary cinema. In fact, his father, Costa-Gavras, was a Greek political filmmaker in the ‘60s who was exiled from his home country during the rise of the military dictatorship in 1967 and forced to move to France in order to make the confrontational masterpiece Z in 1969. Though its dialogue is entirely French, the film is set in Greece and follows the government-assisted assassination of a popular left-wing MP (Grigoris Lambrakis) in 1963, which exacerbated the conditions that allowed the military regime to take power years later.
The film captures his outrage to great effect, becoming the first film ever to be nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, winning the latter. It’s even a favorite among the likes of Oliver Stone and William Friedkin, among others, and absolutely essential for those with any interest whatsoever in revolutionary cinema. The same director would later go on to create a number of masterpieces, most famously the Palme d’Or winner Missing (starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek) and 1972’s State of Siege, both of which fearlessly confront the United States’ hushed involvement in the empowerment of military dictatorships across the world.
Romain Gavras has stated in interviews that his father was feeding him Tarkovsky from the tender age of 7 years old (way too young as anyone who has seen a Tarkovsky film will contest), resulting in his rebellion being his immense appreciation for action cinema such as Die Hard (fair enough!). That marriage between art house filmmaking mastery and action cinema is exactly what Gavras embodies with his film Athena, proving targeted, epic, and wildly emotional all in the same breath. It’s a film that lights a fire beneath the souls of its viewers that’s burned long enough to stay relevant for years to come. With its ending championing a message of the futility of violence, there’s no better time to watch this film than now.
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