Athena

ATHENA   **1/2

Romain Gavras

2022

IDEA:  In the fictional Parisian banlieue of Athena, three adult brothers of Algerian descent become variously involved in a violent uprising against the establishment after their little brother is killed by the police.

IDEA:  Everything about Athena - from its title to its archetypal story of fraternal conflict to its operatic visual and musical overtures - suggests aspirations toward myth, particularly Greek tragedy. Gavras certainly signals his epic intentions in the grandiose formal construction. The film is nothing if not cinematographically dazzling, composed of a series of stupefying, physics-defying sequence shots that have the camera gliding through windows, in and out of a speeding van, and at one point straight into a blaze, fireworks of both the figurative and literal kind exploding all around. It’s the kind of virtuosic camerawork and pyrotechnic spectacle designed to flabbergast, which means it also captures the preponderance of your attention at any given moment. Gavras seems more interested in these kinetic maneuvers than in his characters, who are given only a few defining traits, or in the film’s sociopolitical dimensions, which he engages with mostly as a narrative pretext for the thrilling action set pieces. The latter point is especially troubling, making it difficult to view Athena as much more than another ethically dubious commercial entertainment built from real-life strife and suffering. Gavras has evidently inherited his father’s sense of political urgency and skill for depicting on-the-ground social unrest, but an equivalent human sensitivity, at least here, is less abundant.