Athena film review — Paris banlieue warfare made grandly cinematic

Another Paris altogether to the city of Mrs Harris Goes to Paris backdrops the grandly kinetic Athena. Yet the fictional sprawl of social housing that gives the film its title is just as much a cinematic creation. And director Romain Gavras is a born film-maker. That much is clear from the virtuoso 11-minute opening.

The scene is a police press conference after the killing of a young French-Algerian boy. Rogue officers are seemingly responsible. Then, in a finger-click, black-clad teenage banlieusards rush forward and ransack the station, stealing guns before screaming away in a police van. The camera jinks and careers alongside them, a tricolore fluttering back down the highway to Athena. The cops are right behind. An epic siege will follow.

The sequence is an adrenaline jolt. It also comes with a catch. An earlier figurehead of French cinema, François Truffaut, once asked if it was possible to make a true antiwar movie. As soon as you put conflict on screen, he said, it acquired a queasy thrill. In Athena, the same applies to the fracturing of the republic. To stand in for political complexity, the movie sets up a Greek tragedy between the dead boy’s brothers. One is a soldier in the French army; another the de facto general of the local youths; a third a nihilistic coke dealer. We assume the movie to be outraged, but the only constant is the Molotov choreography. Pitched battles are set to a string section.

Where are the ordinary residents, the kind who starred in less apocalyptic banlieue stories such as Gagarine or Girlhood? Evacuated. A cynic might say that leaves Gavras free to spend more time on his drone shot symphonies of riot shields and smoke bombs. In France, the film has aroused the public antipathy of far-right pundit Éric Zemmour. That, of course, is mere opportunism. The movie doesn’t have enough to say to start a real argument.

★★★☆☆

On Netflix now