[TrueFaith77]

51.Athena (Romain Gavras); grade: F

Athena throws a Molotov cocktail into a combustibly divided culture. Background: Director Romain Gavras is the son of politically-sophisticated and aesthetically-gifted Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, Capital, and the great The Confession). Romain's previous film The World Is Yours references both Scarface and Tarantino to address immigration culture-shock and ethnic criminal underworlds in France (featuring greatest-living actress Isabelle Adjani in a Cesar-nominated performance). So one enters Athena with more than the requisite open mind. The extended long-take that opens the film introduces the emotional-political terrain: 3 Muslim brothers' differing responses to the murder of their 4th and youngest brother by, it is believed, the police. It could also be read as a De Palma-esque media critique. A Molotov cocktail thrown by militant now-youngest brother Karim (Sami Slimane) explodes a press conference meant to encourage peaceful protest featuring the French military-garbed brother Abdel (Dali Benssalah). Shortly after, Karim choreographs the dropping of debris by utilizing his cell phone screen of live news coverage outside the Athena living projects that he and his marauding gang has barricaded. Ultimately, the technique, with its rousing music score and fluid snaking camera movements, celebrates cultural chaos. (The oldest brother Karim (Sami Slimane) has his own socially destructive and degenerate motivation during the tenement's collapse.) With their opposing approaches, handsome Slimane and Benssalah perfectly represent propagandistic semiotics--in balance. As Gavras perversely turns fate, the film and the two brothers choose a side and their equal appeal sentimentalizes privileged filmmaker Gavras's projection of revolutionary politics onto an oppressed minority. Too much a literalist, Gavras takes the barrio name of "Athena" to infuse the story with elements of Greek Tragedy. *SPOILERS*: Topping even Oedipus Rex, all 4 brothers ultimately die (including 1 by fratricide!). Then, Gavras reveals the previously withheld twist: that youngest brother was not killed by the police, after all, but by radical white supremacists posing as police. Their successfully achieved aims: the sparking civil unrest and the destruction of the Athena projects and the undermining of confidence in the police. The imagined power of a fringe political movement to manipulate social distrust actually exposes the irresponsible employment of technique by Gavras. Fortunately, nobody cares about this movie.