Venice Review: Romain Gavras’ ‘Athena’

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Designed as something akin to a Greek tragedy for today’s moment, Venice Film Festival Competition title Athena is a torrent, an inundation, a cascade of rage, fury and frustration over the realities of life for a particular group of French families.

Such conditions exist in most societies, some more dire than others, but here the wages of pent-up anger are presented with a single-minded intensity and extended duration that would be hard to exceed.Following in the powerful wake of the 2019 Oscar-nominated sensation Les Misérables, which was also set in a teeming eastern suburb of Paris rarely seen by outsiders, director Romain Gavras and his co-writers Elias Belkeddar and Les Misérables director Ladj Ly use undiluted adrenalin and immersive you-are-there camerawork to plunge you into the middle of a classical drama for modern times.

The Netflix-backed film grabs you by the throat and barely allows you a moment for a gasp of air.Venice Film Festival 2022 PhotosWere they exposed to a random few minutes of this film, most citizens of the world would never imagine that they were glimpsing Paris, based on the predominantly dark-skinned faces, blandly impersonal apartment towers, unfamiliar vocabulary, pronounced poverty and sense of lingering threat.

In fact, the area is currently undertaking new transportation improvements, but the filmmakers’ interest lies strictly in the suffocating oppression, marginalization, lack of opportunity and explosive potential, which, at least as depicted in the film, remain dire.Athena, lest we forget, was the Greek deity of wisdom and war.