Athena

 Its's a plot that you've seen in a lot of old movies:  three Irish brothers -- one of them is a priest, one is a cop, one is a gangster.  This time-worn narrative is central to Athena, a 2022 film directed by Romain Gravas, the son of Costa Gravas, the father famous for his political thrillers produced in the seventies and thereafter.  In Athena, we follow the fortunes of three brothers, Karim, a violent activist, Abdel, a cop, and Mokter, who seems to be a drug-dealer and gang-leader.  These three young men are mourning the death of their little brother, scarcely more than boy, who has been shot to death, apparently by police.  When Abdel marches to a press conference at the police station where the cops are trying to prevent a riot, Karim throws a Molotov cocktail and the mob overruns the headquarters, seizing caches of weapons, tear gas cannisters, and flares.  Armed with police gear, Karim leads his forces to the banlieue Athena where the rioters fortify the complex of apartment high-rises.  There are a series of spectacularly filmed battles as the police try to seize the banlieue.  In the course of the fighting, Karim is killed while his brother watches.  (At the time, he's holed-up in what the subtitles -- the film's characters speak French and Arabic -- call a "shisha," apparently, a hookah-place shuttered against the rioters.)  Outraged at the death of Karim, Abdel calls his superiors and demands that they identify the cops who killed Idir, his youngest brother, the event the triggers the enormous riot.  For some reason, Karim beats his brother Mokter to death (or, at least, into a coma).  A man named Sebastien, whom we have seen earlier tending a flower garden in a courtyard in the apartment complex, pours gas on everything the building where Abdel is mourning the death of his two brothers.  Propane tanks are gathered and the structure is blown up (and with it presumably Abdel).  The rioters are defeated, strip to their underwear, and forced to kneel on the concrete as the cops surge into the housing complex.  In a brief epilogue, the film flashes back to the death of Idir.  We discover that his murderers were right-wing extremists with scary tattoos on their necks.  After gunning the boy down, the killers doff their cop uniforms to reveal that they are right-wing terrorists.  There's a subplot involving a cop who is captured and held as a hostage by the rioters.  If I recall correctly, Abdel, who spends a lot of time screaming and, literally, growling in this movie, shoots him in the head after the mob has previously beaten him half to death.  

The film's subject matter is very thin.  However, the movie disguises the deficiencies in its formulaic and predictable plot by employing a spectacular mise-en-scene -- it's almost all done in very long takes in which the camera tracks the characters as they dart around the devil's playground of the embattled banlieue.  Most of these shots involve the principals doggedly marching toward the camera, filmed in close-up, as all hell breaks loose around them.  Sometimes, the camera spins off to the side, rotating to show the riot, a colorful affair that seems to involve tens of thousands of fireworks fired by the mob at the cops.  After surveying the impressive chaos, the camera, then, either reverts to the shot of the advancing protagonist or, sometimes, gets behind him to track him across the fiery battlefield.  Some of this is exceptionally impressive, particularly the long  tracking shots in the first half-hour of the movie, some which cover big chunks of real estate but, after awhile, the virtuoso choreography and long takes begin to pall and, after about an hour, the film's energy palls a bit when it becomes apparent that the story really isn't a story at all but just an elaborate battle scene (a bit like Sam Mendes 1917) and that the characters are all entrapped -- despite all their running around, they are literally going nowhere.  The hellish combat imagery is fantastically compelling and, of course, aestheticizes the continuous violence -- it all looks wonderfully picturesque.  This effect is further augmented by a choral soundtrack with operatic elements that sounds -- and I kid you not -- like Camina Burana, all percussive shouting and brusque repetitive musical motifs.  Some of the imagery is literally breathtaking.  In one long battle sequence, the besieged rioters hurl refrigerators from the banlieue ramparts down on the riot cops while unleashing brilliant fusillades of rocket fire on the attackers.  Projectiles rattle off the tops of riot shields held up to create a medieval-looking "shield wall" and the camera whirls around a tightly packed square of police, elbow to elbow, as the mob attacks them with firebombs and clubs.  The effect is a bit like some of the imagery from Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo with the camera ascending through the guns moke (here mists of tear-gas) to show us squares of infantry in uniforms like flower beds attacked by hordes of cavalry.  For a stretch of about 30 minutes, Athena is one of the greatest battle films ever made.  But like Waterloo, there's only so much carnage, even if spectacularly staged that an audience can tolerate, and the movie has no real point to make and, essentially, no characters.  It's hard to develop back-story or any kind of plausible motivation when the protagonists have very few lines and are basically stereotypes in motion charging toward the camera through a chaos of fire and explosions.  I never figured-out exactly what Moktar's role was in all this fighting -- he talks about cocaine and has a White girlfriend and, holed-up in the hookah-place, he has some poor bastard digging a hole for some reason.  Sebastien, the guy who distributes machine-guns to the mob and, then, blows up the apartment building is said to have "lost it" or "gone mental."  I have no idea who he is supposed to be, if he's related to the siblings, and why he decides the blow-up the building.  He has one funny line (it's inadvertent I think):  He orders the young men rioters to bring him propane tanks and petrol; then, he asks a woman warrior -- she's armed and helping out in the battle -- to bring him "a fruit juice", a pretty clear indication of the rioters' attitudes toward women.  (In fact, other than a momentary encounter between Abdel and his mother, there are no women visible anywhere in this huge display of Muslim machismo.)  As the film progresses, newscasts visible in the corners of some of the shots proclaim that the banlieues aren't really part of France and that the riot should be suppressed with extreme prejudice, something that any reasonable audience would endorse give the sheer scale and violence of the fighting.  Further, we learn that this police-shooting is a sort of George Floyd moment in France in which riots have spontaneously erupted in "more than 30 towns" and that a sort of "revolution" is underway.  In this context, it's a weird and anti-climactic coda to the film when we learn that the cops weren't even really responsible for all this bloodshed and that it was, in  fact, right-wing terrorists who stirred up the fighting.  It's as if Derek Chauvin were revealed to be an agent provocateur and the Minneapolis police shown to be  pretty much blameless in George Floyd's murder.  Although racial issues are obviously supposed to be front and center in the film, the movie discounts ideas of systemic racism and pins the blame for the riot on bad guys who are outside of the system.  

Athena often looks like a movie by Gaspar Noe, something on the order of Irreversible, in which a fantastically agitated camera-style, more or less disguises what is going on.  But parts of the movie are undeniably thrilling, an effect achieved by the way the action is staged and filmed.  Athena sits astride a multi-lane freeway that runs under the buildings and, when the rioters, in the end of the first ten-minute  line the ramparts over the freeway and bombard it with rockets and Molotov cocktails, all orchestrated to stirring music, and, as the camera dollies back at high speed to suddenly show the whole theater of war, the effect is spectacular.