Mark Reviews Movies: ATHENA (2022)

Athena, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2022

Here's a film filled with pain, anger, resentment, and resolve. Co-writer/director Romain Gavras' Athena is an impressively terrifying spectacle about an uprising within an apartment complex, sparked by the killing of a 13-year-old boy by the police, fueled by the steady knowledge and repeated realization that nothing will be done about such injustices, and burning with such intensity that we overlook whatever shortcomings might exist within this narrative. The spectacle is the narrative, and it's driven by such deep, understandable emotions that the story needs little more to make its outraged and ultimately tragic point.

Gavras (whose surname should be familiar to those with a knowledge of international political thrillers, since his father is the filmmaker Costa-Gavras) makes his method clear and unmistakable from the very first scene. It begins with an in-motion close-up of Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a soldier in the French Army, who is making his way through a police station to make a statement.

Along the way, a news report briefly explains the only back story we need to hear: Police officers brutally beat that boy, leaving him for dead, in an assault that was captured by someone with a cellphone. The screenplay, penned by the director and co-screenwriters Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly, is succinct in information and, more importantly, how it communicates that information without losing its unstoppable momentum. When he reaches a crowd of reporters, Abdel announces that he is the older brother of Idir, the young teen who has since died as a direct result of the attack. Dressed in his military uniform, Abdel pleads for peace as the investigation into his brother's murder continues.

The rest of the scene is almost impossible to describe in detail, because there are simply so many significant and little details as it unfolds, but easy to generalize. It's a raid on the police station, organized by another of the dead child's brothers Karim (Sami Silmane), and it's filmed by Gavras and cinematographer Matias Boucard in what appears—for all intents and purposes—to be a single, unbroken take.

The logistics of the scene, which involve masses of people scurrying through narrow hallways and various pyrotechnics (fireworks, guns firing rubber bullets, and Molotov cocktails) and multiple vehicles speeding through the streets, suggest that some digital or editing trickery must be afoot. Even if that is the case, though, the possible seams of the cuts and/or the tricks of visual effects are impossible to detect.

Gavras puts us into this confined moment of chaos and rebellion with a clarity of narrative, visual, and emotional purpose. From a technical standpoint, it's a spectacular sequence, of course, with all of these performers and moving parts—especially when it comes to vehicles and how the camera effortlessly moves through and around them in smooth motions—working in tandem to clearly portray this kind of havoc. In terms of plot, the scene is straightforward in its big details, which essentially amount to Karim and his soldiers stealing a weapons safe, but it's the smaller moments, such as the residents of apartments throwing rocks at the stolen police van and Karim fulfilling a seemingly off-handed promise to give someone a cigarette, that give it, this place, and these characters a sense of personality and life.

The rest of the plot is just as simple, and the filmmakers' technique remains just as intimate and impressive (although, admittedly, every other sequence is on a much smaller scope than the opening one, which is to be expected with the story's increased focus on these characters). Abdel returns to the eponymous apartment complex, looking to calm his youngest surviving brother or, barring that, hoping to clear as many bystanders to the approaching conflict from the buildings. Karim continues to organize the rebellion against the encroaching police force, while demanding that the identities of the cops who killed his brother be revealed and actual justice be served upon them.

A few other characters figure into this story, too. There's Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), the eldest of the four brothers (He has a different father than the other three), who is in the middle of a cocaine deal involving crooked cops when the uprising erupts. While the subplot of the oldest sibling hiding in a shed and trying to protect his stash seems isolated from Karim's rage and Abdel's desire for peace, the impersonal, apathetic, self-interested qualities that quickly and continually define Moktar, especially compared to his younger brothers, do subtly say something about consequences of avoiding any fight that isn't solely for oneself.

The other major character is Jérôme (Anthony Bajon), one of the countless federal police officers brought in to quell the unrest within the complex. He's the father of young twin daughters, a fact repeatedly signaled by the polish the girls painted on his fingernails, and if the development of these characters is as concise as that, Gavras gets considerable results simply by the casting of these actors—and, more to the point, the face of each one.

Bajon, for example, possesses a soft, innocent visage and eyes that are filled with fear from the moment he witnesses exactly the situation he will be facing. It goes a long toward finding some sympathy, not with the system of which the character is a part, but with the basic humanity of at least this particular man. Meanwhile, Benssalah quietly displays strength of both integrity and compassion, while also hinting that events are pushing him in some direction that will be determined by, well, how those events finally unfold. As the young revolutionary, Silmane embodies righteous determination and silent heartbreak, and the final piece of the ideological puzzle is Sébastien, played by Alexis Manenti as a man who appears calm and almost happy amidst the smoke, fire, tear gas, and social disarray.

This confined, thorny political and familial drama magnifies grief and anger to the scale of a societal reckoning and tragedy. To be sure, the skill, scope, and spectacle of Gavras' filmmaking are astonishing, but in Athena, the filmmaker uses that technique to portray how human pain ignored on an individual level can and will escalate until it can no longer be ignored.

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