Athena (2022)

Athena arrives with impeccable credentials in the matter of representation. Its cast is drawn almost entirely from French-North African performers, and the banlieue they inhabit is rendered with the specificity of lived geography instead of set dressing. The film's engine is racial grievance, plainly stated: a thirteen-year-old boy is beaten by men in police uniforms who turn out to be far-right provocateurs, and the burning housing complex is the consequence of their deliberate design. This is not subtext. The closing shot of the uniforms going up in flames makes the argument explicit, and the argument concerns race in France.

The omissions are equally instructive. There is no LGBTQ presence, no body-positivity thread, no neurodivergent character, no environmental lament. The feminist register is faint, since the narrative concerns warring brothers and their masculine codes, with women confined to the perimeter. An anti-capitalist reading is available, given the poverty on display and the drug dealer attempting to move his contraband through the chaos, but the anger here is aimed at police and the republic, not at capital as a system. The drug dealer is a businessman, and the film treats him as a nuisance.

Where the film might have lectured, it detonates instead. Reviewers were nearly unanimous that the technique overwhelms the thesis, that the long unbroken takes and the fireworks and the tear gas add up to a sensation of pure momentum. The politics remain a mood, an atmosphere of dispossession, and the film trusts the imagery to carry them. Whether that constitutes cowardice or confidence is a matter for other critics. From this chair, the spectacle is superb and the sermon is absent, which is its own kind of statement.