#benjamin weill

ATHENA [ROMAIN GAVRAS, 2022]

'Did Greek tragedy or the banlieue come first for you?'

I think Greek tragedy. We chose to make it about the intimate pain of brotherhood, where their pain and rage and way of grieving is going to spill over neighbourhoods and then spill over the nation – which is often how wars started. In the film, a lie pushes people on the ground to towards conflict, the same pattern since the Trojan War to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Colin Powell. The territory (of the banlieue) is fertile for those conflicts, but really it was the way of unfolding that story that was the key for us. [...]

ATHENA [ROMAIN GAVRAS, 2022]

ATHENA [ROMAIN GAVRAS, 2022]

[...]

(As Karim, the young Sami Slimane makes the most stunning acting debut I’ve seen in ages.) When the riot police arrive, they climb enormous ladders, like medieval soldiers trying to enter a fortress at night. They cluster their shields together in formation, like the ancient Romans and Greeks. The kids of Athena spin on their bikes around the cops and shower them with fireworks, which look like gauntlets of colorful space lasers.

[...]

Gavras compresses time in subtle ways, too, enhancing the idea that the film is working on multiple levels. Abdel leaves a gathering where he’s just seen his mother and races down flights of stairs to the far end of the complex — where he finds his mother again, among a group of evacuees. The people around her are carrying luggage, lamps, furniture. We realize this isn’t just an evacuation. It’s a migration, and that these people are leaving Athena the way they might leave a nation in flames. In other words, what we’re watching isn’t a moment, but a historical process — a slow-motion collapse that has taken decades to get here. And we realize that the origins of this madness run deeper, longer, and wider than anyone realizes.

[...]

Bilge Ebiri

ATHENA [ROMAIN GAVRAS, 2022]

ATHENA [ROMAIN GAVRAS, 2022]