four years later The world is yourswhich had been presented at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes, the French director Romain Gavras, member of the Kourtrajmé collective, arrives on Netlix with Athenaco-written with his friend Ladj Ly, director of WretchedCésar for best film 2020.
The film would be, according to the promotional arguments put forward by Netflix and its authors, neither more nor less than a “tragedy”, and we are clearly in this register, since the film is centered on a dislocated sibling in a battlefield setting. , without forgetting the name of the district in question, Athena, or the Greek origins of the director, son of the great Costa-Gavras: “When I was young, I was never allowed to watch Walt Disney films, I was rocked by tragedy or Greek mythology, a teenager who kills his father, who marries his mother, who gouges out his eyes, or a woman who is going to eat her children, so I’ve always been steeped in strong symbolic images. And that’s what we tried to transcribe inside this film, not a second ago where we let go of the viewer.”
“At the same time, we tried to bring back an iconography that is timeless, to go beyond the societal news item and include it in a more timeless dimension.”
Romain Gavrasat franceinfo
The story is therefore that of three brothers, Abdel, a soldier who wants to ease tensions, Moktar, a thug, and Karim, who becomes the leader of the rioters.
violence triggered by the death of Idir, the youngest member of this sibling, after a police intervention. Romain Gavras takes us on board with these three characters and their confrontations but also introduces us to Jérôme, a CRS fallen from the nest played by Anthony Bajon. “In the film I think there are no good guys, no bad guys, that everyone has their dark side, and it was important for me to show a CRS character, since they don’t do not have the right to speak, according to the law, emphasizes the director. And the idea was to show a young CRS, for what is probably his first mission, whose costume is too big for him, who wants to escape from all that. And therefore to have precisely all these points of view, and characters who react differently to fire.”
Whether Athena is so strong, it is first of all thanks to its spectacular visual style, with pyrotechnics, in the first sense of the term, without forgetting an incredible ten-minute introductory scene, in a sequence shot. Gavras is also very good when it comes to casting “mouths”, with very charismatic actors, without forgetting the background, and a reflection on violence as an impasse, the power of images, and manipulation.