Romain Gavras’s new drama-thriller is about racism, violence and injustice in the Paris banlieues – broadly in the tradition of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables. It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.
It tells the story of four brothers of Algerian origin in the same tough Athena housing estate. Idir has just been killed by a bunch of cops – or guys in cop uniforms – for daring to talk back, an atrocity captured on a viral video. Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated army hero, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) is a coke-dealing gangster and Karim (Sami Slimane) is a local guy seething with rage at his brother’s racist murder.
The movie begins with Abdel giving a press conference, flanked by police and politicians, appealing for calm following Idir’s killing and asking people to join him in a “silent march” of peaceful protest. Some hope. In any other movie, that press conference would be a bland opener, a piece of narrative throat-clearing preceding any number of dull dialogue scenes laying out the issues. But not this one. Karim is there at the press conference: he throws a Molotov cocktail at the assembled cops and then, leading hundreds of Athena guys, launches an extraordinary Assault on Precinct 13-style attack on the police station, stealing weapons and a police van before retreating to his inner-city stronghold. This breathtaking action sequence looks like the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
Yet after that audacious coup, the movie loses its dramatic shape as the situation between the three brothers is sketched in. The introduction of a conspiracy theory subplot feels like fence-sitting on the issue of police racism, and the film also brings in a rather perfunctory white “terrorist” figure called Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), who appears to be there to differentiate the brothers from truly fanatical and unjustified violence. The film is very reliant on the news on the TV in the corner to underline the larger, national implications.
Athena is forthright and bold in its way: that opening sequence is a barnstormer. But there is not much human complexity or human authenticity in the drama that follows.
Athena screened at the Venice film festival, and is released on 23 September on Netflix.
