Review: ‘Athena,’ a fiery drama of civil unrest, is mostly blowing smoke

Romain Gavras’ “Athena” opens with a single-take sequence so intricately choreographed, and so breathtaking in its visible sweep and emotional drive, it’s nearly a disgrace that there’s one other 90 minutes or so of film to go together with it. It begins at a information convention the place a French soldier, Abdel (Dali Benssalah), gravely acknowledges the latest killing of his 13-year-old brother, Idir, throughout an obvious altercation with police. The tragic incident — the third occasion of police brutality in two months, blares a information report — was captured in a video that’s since gone viral; with the group in an uproar, Abdel has been referred to as upon, at nice private value, to assist management the harm. However that goal is clearly futile as soon as one other man, Karim (Sami Slimane), hurls a Molotov cocktail, igniting this tinderbox of a film and turning these already tense environs right into a full-blown warfare zone.

Gavras’ choice to movie all this mayhem in a single shot — or one thing that appears an terrible lot like one shot — forges a visible hyperlink between Abdel and Karim, which is hardly an accident. It’s quickly revealed that the 2 males are brothers, although their shared grief at Idir’s dying has pulled them in radically completely different instructions. The shot retains unspooling, by no means blinking: With pulse-pounding virtuosity (the cinematography is by Matias Boucard), the digicam plunges after Karim and different indignant younger males as they ransack the police station, steal a cache of weapons after which joyride their means again to the Athena housing property they name residence. And this place is their residence, a sentiment they underscore by unfurling a French tricolor alongside the best way: It’s a defiant declaration of belonging in a rustic that hasn’t at all times claimed them in return.

Earlier than lengthy, one other flag — an Algerian flag — will burst into the body, an emblem of those younger males’s North African lineage that subtly ties “Athena” to any variety of political thrillers about French colonialism and Algerian resistance. On the similar time, the emphasis on police brutality carries a topical edge that transcends strict cultural and geographical borders; you is likely to be reminded of American headlines each latest and distant. You may additionally be reminded of 2019’s Oscar-nominated “Les Misérables,” a blistering banlieue drama written and directed by Ladj Ly. If “Athena” doesn’t obtain the identical energy (even with Ly credited as a co-writer with Gavras and Elias Belkeddar), it’s partly as a result of its politics finally really feel like a feint — a prop in a narrative that cares much less about its characters, and the huge array of human experiences they characterize, than about its personal formal virtuosity.

Nonetheless, let’s give that virtuosity its due. Gavras’ work right here could courtroom comparisons with the tense political thrillers made by his father, Costa-Gavras (“Z,” “Lacking”), however his talent with the digicam has lengthy been in proof. (Earlier than his earlier options, “Our Day Will Come” and “The World Is Yours,” he directed music movies for artists together with M.I.A., Jay-Z and Kanye West.) Because of the magic of digital modifying, the flowery long-take sequences of the sort he makes an attempt right here could also be simpler to drag off than they have been when, say, Orson Welles was capturing “Contact of Evil.” Nonetheless, Gavras exhibits spectacular dedication to the method as he plunges Athena (or “Athena!” to evaluate by the rallying cries of the group) right into a state of siege. The digicam retains shifting and shifting as chaos erupts, indignant male our bodies jostle each other within the body, and sparks and flares gentle up the night time sky, illuminating a battlefield filled with helmets and riot shields. The bodily verisimilitude is each jolting and enveloping.

As a sustained piece of motion choreography, then, “Athena” is ceaselessly staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of recent French identification, the film feels skinny and overdetermined. Gavras has composed the story as a sweeping symphony of civil unrest, pushed to grimly operatic heights by the depth of the performances, the wailing choral crescendos of Gener8ion’s rating and, above all, the unyielding gaze of the digicam. He lunges for each the urgency of a information headline and the fatalism of a Greek tragedy, which primarily means he proffers gritty realism with one hand and embraces bald contrivances with the opposite.

There’s one thing slightly too dramatically expedient about the best way “Athena” facilities its story on not two however three squabbling brothers, every representing a unique face of immigrant rage. For some time, Abdel is the peacemaker caught within the center, decided to quell unrest and assist the residents of Athena evacuate safely. Karim, his lengthy hair marking him as this story’s romantic revolutionary, needs Idir’s killers publicly recognized and delivered to justice, and he’s prepared to make a hostage of a younger cop (a sympathetic Anthony Bajon) to make sure that occurs. The eldest of the siblings is Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug supplier making an attempt to smuggle his means out of a nightmarish state of affairs. Not like his brothers, he cares and stands for nothing besides his earnings.

As forcefully inhabited as these characters are — particularly by Benssalah and Slimane, who make Abdel and Karim’s cohesion as palpable as their fury — they hardly ever come throughout as greater than items moved about at will in a fiery, doom-laden chess recreation. Much more of a cipher is Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), a mysterious determine — however not, fortunately, one other brother — who skulks with wordless menace across the periphery of the story, then ushers it towards its grim if spectacularly photogenic finale. In these moments, “Athena” exhibits it likes to play with hearth, although primarily due to how cool it seems.