First as tragedy, then as farce
Athena is representative of a trend in contemporary French cinema that I like to call banlieue porn, films taking place in Paris’ poorer, darker suburbs (les banlieues) and focusing on the lives of crime and violence that their predominantly young, immigrant, and Muslim population purportedly faces every day. Such films walk a fine line between raising social consciousness and trading in reductive stereotypes. I don’t know what the earliest representative of this trend is, but the landmark film is Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and the most recent example to receive international acclaim is Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables (2019), which was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. Athena sees the return of Ladj Ly, this time as one of the screenwriters, though I would be hard-pressed to say what his specific contribution was.
A preview screening of such a banlieue porn film—Novembre, a dramatization of the investigation following the terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015—first put Athena on my radar. A cinema employee introduced the film and was boasting about the theatre’s new high-performance sound system. He asked if anyone in the audience had seen Athena, to which everyone but me responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” “Well,” he said, “I saw Athena on our new system. I swear to you, you did not see the same film I did.”
The context for all this is that Athena, whose reputation rests on its aggressive visual and aural stimulation of your lizard brain, was dumped on Netflix all the way back in September 2022, so that, if you are so inclined, you can comfortably watch it from the confines of your bathroom, if you know the film exists at all. Netflix has committed many crimes against cinema in its time, but this is one of the worst. Love it or hate it, if you are going to experience Athena, you should experience it on the largest screen possible.
And, boy, do a lot of people hate it. Allociné, a French review aggregator comparable to Rotten Tomatoes, has an audience score straight down the middle, with an average of 2.5/5. This is not because the film is mediocre, but because it is divisive. Much like last year’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, this is a film that evokes extreme reactions. Even in the French press, publications like the left-leaning Libération and Catholic newspaper La Croix have made common cause in giving the film the lowest marks possible. That makes the film so much more interesting, in my opinion. More interesting to watch and, in the end, more interesting to discuss.
Take one look at that poster, and you might think that the film is an angry screed against police violence. And you would be wrong. The director, Romain Gavras, might be the son of Costa-Gavras, who helmed Z (1969), one of the great political thrillers. But viewing Athena as a political thriller is setting yourself up for disappointment. As implied by its title, Athena wants to be a Greek tragedy. To this end, it is starkly schematic. It follows the three unities, for one: It focuses on a single event (unity of action), it takes place over a single day (unity of time), and it unfolds in a single location, the titular—and fictional—banlieue (unity of place). The main characters, each representing different sides of the conflict, are abstract, almost allegories, rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. It has something of a chorus in the form of newscasts and other offhand reports via radio or other forms of media. And, uh, it doesn’t end well.
The differences between Athena and Greek tragedy are also instructive. Greek tragedies are dialogue-heavy and famously keep all the violence offstage. Athena is something like the opposite of this. All the stylized violence is on-screen, and in place of soliloquys are functional exchanges like: “Putain, mec. Ça va pas, ça? Emmenez-moi le condé. Nique ta mère.” Also, Greek tragedies are cathartic and leave the audience sadder but wiser. The ending of Athena is apt to enrage.
The movie begins with its best scene, and I blanch at the prospect of spoiling it. Since it is globally available on Netflix, you could do worse than to sit down right now and watch it until the title card. It begins with Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a police officer, giving a press conference addressing the recent death of a thirteen-year-old boy who was the victim of police brutality. The dead boy is none other than Abdel’s own brother, Idir. The police are floating the theory that he was not killed by real officers but by right-wing agitators. In the audience is one of Abdel’s other brothers, the lanky Karim (Sami Slimane), who is not buying this bullshit and sets off a Molotov cocktail right then and there. What happens next, you need to see it for yourself. It involves one of cinema’s favorite dick-measuring instruments, the never-ending tracking shot, but it is used to incredible effect to set the mood.
The movie will never get that good again. In fact, it will gradually worsen until it peters out on what is unquestionably its worst scene. It follows the you-are-there video game aesthetic of films like 1917, The Raid, and the underseen Troubles thriller ’71. Where it departs from those films is splitting the perspective among different characters. Not only do we have Abdel as the face of the "Forces of Order" and Karim as the leader of the righteous crusade against them. We also have Jérôme (Anthony Bajon), a police officer and new father who becomes a pawn between the two sides; Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), a seeming idiot who is first described in dialogue as a “Fiche S” (i.e., a suspected terrorist); and Mokhtar (Ouassini Embarek), Abdel and Karim’s other, other brother, a drug dealer who will side with whoever is winning.
Mokhtar, at least, is one character too many. He fractures the story into too many moving parts, and he is poorly performed by Embarek, who graduated from the YELLING IS ACTING school of dramaturgy (it’s a community college). That the plot hinges on four different characters who all happen to be blood brothers strains the suspension of disbelief just a little too much. I also don’t think Sébastien adds much to the story beyond some pyrotechnics (whatever his background, he knows just a little too much about how to build an explosive device from household objects). Jérôme is more of a plot device than anything. I would have been fine with following Karim the entire time. He has the most interesting role in the story, and he has a strange, eminently cinematic face—much more cinematic than the square-jawed Abdel, who turns out to be the protagonist.
A common French complaint about the film—one that won’t apply to English-language viewers—is that they could not properly hear the dialogue over the bombast. On the one hand, this is not especially significant because something like ninety percent of the dialogue is just strings of French curse words. If you are unschooled in the art of French cursing, this one will teach you all the swears, with a healthy dose of argot to boot. On the other hand, the movie has the irritating habit of dropping exposition into the background noise (the “chorus”). This happens in the opening scene, where some offscreen reporter gives pertinent information about Abdel’s family history. I had to go back and rewatch it because the film only gradually reveals the relationship among the brothers. Likewise, I had to rewatch Jérôme’s mission briefing, where Sébastien is mentioned. This happens long before we see Sébastien on-screen, arranging flowers in the middle of a firefight like nothing is happening.
Then there is the ending, or rather the coda, which is an absolute dumpster fire. It answers a question no one was asking, and it would have given the film so much more pathos (tragedy, remember) if it had been left ambiguous. As it stands, it plays the Both Sides game in a film that absolutely did not need such a balance. This movie is enamored with Greek tragedy, so let’s use a Greek word. It depicts a war, a polemos. It should have been a unilateral polemic against police brutality, for the same reason that Novembre, where the villains are not just terrorists but real-life mass-murderers, is understandably sympathetic to the police. The coda is the worst of it—I would go so far as to say that you should just not watch it (you’ll know when to stop)—but the problem manifests earlier. The climax comes down to Abdel making a choice, and what he does is a variation on the morally defensible thing. But you don’t go to Greek tragedy expecting the characters to make wise and ethical choices. They should be murdering their children and eating them (offstage, of course; we need some sense of decorum here).
Then why the high score? Two words: lizard brain. The score reflects the high I was riding immediately after watching it as well as how much I have thought about it since then, aided by many other thoughtful reviews, both positive and negative. It’s a roller coaster ride from beginning to end and just completely exhilarating (and exhausting) to watch. It also has the rare gift of knowing when to bow out (well, apart from the coda). It clocks in at under 100 minutes, and that is such a precious and rare thing in movies these days. Unfortunately, your enjoyment is likely to depend on your ability to divorce the film from contemporary social issues. A definitive indictment of police violence and anti-immigrant sentiment might yet be made, but Athena ain’t it.
In any case, this movie is primed to give you a strong emotional response. You should absolutely watch it. It will either be one of the best films you see all year. Or one of the worst.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
A preview screening of such a banlieue porn film—Novembre, a dramatization of the investigation following the terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015—first put Athena on my radar. A cinema employee introduced the film and was boasting about the theatre’s new high-performance sound system. He asked if anyone in the audience had seen Athena, to which everyone but me responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” “Well,” he said, “I saw Athena on our new system. I swear to you, you did not see the same film I did.”
The context for all this is that Athena, whose reputation rests on its aggressive visual and aural stimulation of your lizard brain, was dumped on Netflix all the way back in September 2022, so that, if you are so inclined, you can comfortably watch it from the confines of your bathroom, if you know the film exists at all. Netflix has committed many crimes against cinema in its time, but this is one of the worst. Love it or hate it, if you are going to experience Athena, you should experience it on the largest screen possible.
And, boy, do a lot of people hate it. Allociné, a French review aggregator comparable to Rotten Tomatoes, has an audience score straight down the middle, with an average of 2.5/5. This is not because the film is mediocre, but because it is divisive. Much like last year’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, this is a film that evokes extreme reactions. Even in the French press, publications like the left-leaning Libération and Catholic newspaper La Croix have made common cause in giving the film the lowest marks possible. That makes the film so much more interesting, in my opinion. More interesting to watch and, in the end, more interesting to discuss.
Take one look at that poster, and you might think that the film is an angry screed against police violence. And you would be wrong. The director, Romain Gavras, might be the son of Costa-Gavras, who helmed Z (1969), one of the great political thrillers. But viewing Athena as a political thriller is setting yourself up for disappointment. As implied by its title, Athena wants to be a Greek tragedy. To this end, it is starkly schematic. It follows the three unities, for one: It focuses on a single event (unity of action), it takes place over a single day (unity of time), and it unfolds in a single location, the titular—and fictional—banlieue (unity of place). The main characters, each representing different sides of the conflict, are abstract, almost allegories, rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. It has something of a chorus in the form of newscasts and other offhand reports via radio or other forms of media. And, uh, it doesn’t end well.
The differences between Athena and Greek tragedy are also instructive. Greek tragedies are dialogue-heavy and famously keep all the violence offstage. Athena is something like the opposite of this. All the stylized violence is on-screen, and in place of soliloquys are functional exchanges like: “Putain, mec. Ça va pas, ça? Emmenez-moi le condé. Nique ta mère.” Also, Greek tragedies are cathartic and leave the audience sadder but wiser. The ending of Athena is apt to enrage.
The movie begins with its best scene, and I blanch at the prospect of spoiling it. Since it is globally available on Netflix, you could do worse than to sit down right now and watch it until the title card. It begins with Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a police officer, giving a press conference addressing the recent death of a thirteen-year-old boy who was the victim of police brutality. The dead boy is none other than Abdel’s own brother, Idir. The police are floating the theory that he was not killed by real officers but by right-wing agitators. In the audience is one of Abdel’s other brothers, the lanky Karim (Sami Slimane), who is not buying this bullshit and sets off a Molotov cocktail right then and there. What happens next, you need to see it for yourself. It involves one of cinema’s favorite dick-measuring instruments, the never-ending tracking shot, but it is used to incredible effect to set the mood.
The movie will never get that good again. In fact, it will gradually worsen until it peters out on what is unquestionably its worst scene. It follows the you-are-there video game aesthetic of films like 1917, The Raid, and the underseen Troubles thriller ’71. Where it departs from those films is splitting the perspective among different characters. Not only do we have Abdel as the face of the "Forces of Order" and Karim as the leader of the righteous crusade against them. We also have Jérôme (Anthony Bajon), a police officer and new father who becomes a pawn between the two sides; Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), a seeming idiot who is first described in dialogue as a “Fiche S” (i.e., a suspected terrorist); and Mokhtar (Ouassini Embarek), Abdel and Karim’s other, other brother, a drug dealer who will side with whoever is winning.
Mokhtar, at least, is one character too many. He fractures the story into too many moving parts, and he is poorly performed by Embarek, who graduated from the YELLING IS ACTING school of dramaturgy (it’s a community college). That the plot hinges on four different characters who all happen to be blood brothers strains the suspension of disbelief just a little too much. I also don’t think Sébastien adds much to the story beyond some pyrotechnics (whatever his background, he knows just a little too much about how to build an explosive device from household objects). Jérôme is more of a plot device than anything. I would have been fine with following Karim the entire time. He has the most interesting role in the story, and he has a strange, eminently cinematic face—much more cinematic than the square-jawed Abdel, who turns out to be the protagonist.
A common French complaint about the film—one that won’t apply to English-language viewers—is that they could not properly hear the dialogue over the bombast. On the one hand, this is not especially significant because something like ninety percent of the dialogue is just strings of French curse words. If you are unschooled in the art of French cursing, this one will teach you all the swears, with a healthy dose of argot to boot. On the other hand, the movie has the irritating habit of dropping exposition into the background noise (the “chorus”). This happens in the opening scene, where some offscreen reporter gives pertinent information about Abdel’s family history. I had to go back and rewatch it because the film only gradually reveals the relationship among the brothers. Likewise, I had to rewatch Jérôme’s mission briefing, where Sébastien is mentioned. This happens long before we see Sébastien on-screen, arranging flowers in the middle of a firefight like nothing is happening.
Then there is the ending, or rather the coda, which is an absolute dumpster fire. It answers a question no one was asking, and it would have given the film so much more pathos (tragedy, remember) if it had been left ambiguous. As it stands, it plays the Both Sides game in a film that absolutely did not need such a balance. This movie is enamored with Greek tragedy, so let’s use a Greek word. It depicts a war, a polemos. It should have been a unilateral polemic against police brutality, for the same reason that Novembre, where the villains are not just terrorists but real-life mass-murderers, is understandably sympathetic to the police. The coda is the worst of it—I would go so far as to say that you should just not watch it (you’ll know when to stop)—but the problem manifests earlier. The climax comes down to Abdel making a choice, and what he does is a variation on the morally defensible thing. But you don’t go to Greek tragedy expecting the characters to make wise and ethical choices. They should be murdering their children and eating them (offstage, of course; we need some sense of decorum here).
Then why the high score? Two words: lizard brain. The score reflects the high I was riding immediately after watching it as well as how much I have thought about it since then, aided by many other thoughtful reviews, both positive and negative. It’s a roller coaster ride from beginning to end and just completely exhilarating (and exhausting) to watch. It also has the rare gift of knowing when to bow out (well, apart from the coda). It clocks in at under 100 minutes, and that is such a precious and rare thing in movies these days. Unfortunately, your enjoyment is likely to depend on your ability to divorce the film from contemporary social issues. A definitive indictment of police violence and anti-immigrant sentiment might yet be made, but Athena ain’t it.
In any case, this movie is primed to give you a strong emotional response. You should absolutely watch it. It will either be one of the best films you see all year. Or one of the worst.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
