Athena: Delacroix for the Snapchat age

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival

For pure bravura, adrenalin and technical brilliance, the first fifteen minutes of Romain Gavras’s Athena are hard to beat; the openings of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Gravity (2013), both similarly visceral experiential onslaughts, come to mind. A press conference announcing the death of a young boy at the hands of the police literally explodes when protestors launch an attack on the police station, raid weapons, steal a police van and drive it back to the Athena housing estate (the Parisian suburb Évry-Courcouronnes standing in). The one-take is an oft-overused gimmick, but Gavras and cinematographer Matias Boucard create such dynamism with their swooping, chasing camera, it’s hard to believe the acrobatics in the frame remain so coherent and exciting.

The story that ensues has the classical neatness implied by the title. The young victim’s three brothers each have a different relationship to the French state. Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated soldier, considered a traitor by those left behind for serving a state seen as hostile to them. Karim (Sami Slimane) is the charismatic revolutionary leader, who shares his brother’s intense discipline – this isn’t a game, he yells at his fellow rioters – but is enraged at the French state and wants revenge. Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) is a coked-up criminal who barely knew his brother and is far more concerned with getting his drugs and guns out of the ’hood before the police break the siege. On the other side of the barricades is Jérôme (Anthony Bajon), a nervous young policeman with twin daughters at home, who just wants to make it to the end of his shift alive. Just in case this mix weren’t incendiary enough, a sociopathic terrorist (Alexis Manenti) has also taken refuge in the Athena estate.

Gavras and co-writers Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly (director of Les Miserables, 2019) have created an epic social realist thriller. Eschewing a shaky handheld camera for a gliding point of view that resembles Roger Deakins’ work in 1917 (2019), Gavras knows when to cut and when to allow a moment to breathe. Some of his images – with fireworks fired at the police and teargas engulfing the scene – are sublimely, disturbingly beautiful: Delacroix for the Snapchat age. GENER8ION’s soundtrack, when it barges through the sound of explosions, escalates the tension further.

Athena is a family tragedy and a political one. With its vision of nigh-on apocalyptic civil war egged on by the far right, Athena is the most exciting political thriller since 2006’s Children of Men.