The critiques were very mixed. Positive critiques highlight the fact that the movie takes on all the tough topics one would expect from a social commentary and deals with them in a way that equips the audience with a comprehension that allows them to appreciate and sympathise with the situation in the banlieues, suburban ghettos, as well as evaluate how the police handled it. No doubt this comes in part from the frequent use of frenetic tracking shots that place the audience within the chaos, first hand. Others mention that this movie has the aesthetic of a Greek tragedy, evoked through a double entendre inferred by the film’s title. Indeed, some claim the aesthetic is purely political shock: the film reflects the image of a country on the verge of ruin. The negative critiques were also numerous. Some contend that the film is dishonest and unsatisfactory in every way and that the mysterious character, the former terrorist, Sébastien’s radical Islamism is to blame for the social uprising featured. Yet others say not enough is said, that the only thing the audience is left to remember is that the revolt was illegitimate, absurd, and nothing else or any actions taken matter – the position of the far-right. Most French critics argue that the movie is too political; but this was over a year ago before a very similar situation played out following the killing of Nahel Merzouk by French police in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. International critics tend to have a more positive view of the film. One critic argued that it is a virtuoso movie with a rarely witnessed lyricism.
The film is Romain Gavras’s 2022 Athena. The plot picks up in the aftermath of a police blunder in the banlieue of Athena, just outside Paris, which resulted in the death of a young boy. The film focuses on the deceased boy’s brothers, who try to make sense of the events against a backdrop of unrest taking place in their banlieue. Each brother represents different ways in which immigrants ‘take on systems of power that are not designed for them to succeed’. Moktar is an opportunist who solely thinks about his drug traffic, which is brought to a grinding halt by the uprising. Karim represents an all-or-nothing radical, willing to risk his life to know the names of the police officers responsible for the death of his little brother. Finally, Abdel stands in between the two other brothers. He has just returned from a mission in Mali as a soldier and is conflicted between his duty to the police and his loyalty to his brothers, a titanic achievement not only for his own piece of mind, but for the peace, order, and safety of their community. As a barricade forms, locking the banlieue and all is citizens within and the French police out, much of what happens in the outside world is feed through overheard and often cut to imagery from the 24/7 news channel, BFMTV. This is how we are slowly introduced to the third key character, the shadowy Sébastien. BFMTV reports fears from the police that Sébastien resides in Athena and is suspected of barbaric acts in the past. We first meet Sébastien, as the situation in Athena escalates and our apparent hero, Abdel, asks Sébastien to go help the rioters, even though he has become a completely different person from the devout follower of Islam he is first witnessed by the audience. Sébastien is now a man fascinated by destruction. Where Abdel is torn between two ideals, that of family and that of duty to his country, we can see Sébastien conflicted between staying quiet and hiding, perhaps a coward indeed, and being consumed by the destruction taking place all around him.
Athena directed by Romain Gavras, Iconoclast and Lyly Films, 2022. 1:39:33
Historically, the banlieues were largely developed during the urbanisation period and the rapid industrialisation of land in the nineteenth century France. The banlieues were created to allow more people to live close to the big cities, which, themselves, expanded due to the urbanisation boom. As it is cheaper to live in the banlieues than in the city centre, the population living in the banlieues tended to be more ethnically and racially diverse. It was a natural place for immigrants, wishing to work in the city, to affordably reside. As the backgrounds of the diverse people living in banlieues broke from French culture, a resentment festered between the people and the police. The word ‘banlieue’ developed a stronger connotation than its English transition of suburb. It became a strong marker of disadvantage and now carries negative connotations, such as urban deprivation, criminality, and violence. Recently, the banlieues have been associated with inter-racial conflict, Islamism, violence against women, police brutality, and, of course, riots and other forms of urban disorder.
In 2005, two youngsters living in the Parisian banlieues died as result of electrocution following their attempted fleeing from police. This was the touch paper set ablaze alongside the persistent high unemployment among young people and police harassment in the banlieues. Riots erupted all over France. A state of emergency was declared and extended for three weeks. In total, three people died, almost 3,000 people were arrested, and more than 8,000 vehicles were burned. Nicolas Sarkozy, minister of the interior at the time, was accused of having worsened the situation. During the riots, it is said that he asked the prefects that both legal and undocumented immigrants who were convicted be immediately deported. In 2008, then-President Sarkozy implemented a plan called Espoir Banlieues, whose goal was to reduce the gap between the banlieues and the rest of the territory. It focuses on education, employment, opening up, and security. However, this plan did not gather enough financing, which shows that politicians do not see this as a pressing issue.
The police situation remains desperate for those who reside within the banlieues. Riot police remain on constant call, replacing the everyday police while there is never enough money and therefore enough staff. ID checks and riot mitigation is untenable. New and inexperienced recruits gain their training in a baptism by fire as they are assigned to these poor suburban towns. The fact that these locations are not their home or anywhere they particularly desire to work or reside within makes matters all the worse. Consequently, by failing to increase everyday police presence since the mid-1990s, the state has favoured the militarisation of police in the banlieues. To fill the policing gaps at the local level, the state relies on diverse types of militarised units, such as the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) and the Esquadron de Gendarmerie Mobile (EGM or Gendarmerie). Like a military wishing to remain untethered to a never-ending quagmire, units deployed to these banlieues engage in their assigned intervention, and then go back to where they came from. In and out. This means that they have no preconceptions about the environment of the banlieues or who lives there. Resorting to summary tactics, these CRS or Gendarmerie police officers do nothing to help stabilise the environment in the long term. No rapport is established between the police and the policed. No progress is even attempted. Moreover, because the rapid reassignment of these units grants them such a facelessness that individual officers or their commanders are not required to answer to the residents for their behaviour and are rarely pressured to do so. Despite the government’s efforts to change the situation, the militarisation of the police in the banlieues continues exponentially. The way the police handle situations in the banlieues pushes the residents to defend themselves, violently if need be. Thus, the police have started to use rubber-bullet weapons to retaliate and protect themselves since the early 2000s, incited by Nicholas Sarkozy.
Any recipe for disaster is incomplete without the intervention of the courts. The Court of Cassation, France’s highest court of law, has ruled that ‘anti-discrimination laws are not to be applied in the same manner in areas renowned for a high crime rate, as is the case of all the housing projects of the banlieues’. Defeat declared in any hopes of ever normalising the banlieues, now judicial laxity, mixed with the increased militarisation of the police, allows for the banlieues to remain in a disaster or war like state. The result is a maintained and perpetuated legalistic style of policing. Thus, it is not surprising to observe that police officers in the banlieues are strongly suspected of discriminatory, racist, or violent behaviour.
The film’s director explained how Athena gives the audience a way into the people living with this history of government failure. He notes that the three brothers represent the diverse ways immigrants and marginalised communities take on systems of power that are not designed for them to succeed, as well as the different perspectives or responses to the racial injustice of French society.
For the first year of the film’s release, it was hard to argue that Athena would stand the test of time. It could even have been dismissed as style over substance as a more nuanced exploration of the motivations of the communities at war throughout the film leaves one wanting. In fact, one could even go so far as to call it a less substantial, yet more modern take on Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 celebrated film, La Haine. But then 27 June 2023 happened. In a banlieue similar to Athena, Nanterre, seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk was fatally shot while fleeing from two police officers. A protest outside the police headquarters the same day erupted into a riot. On 29 June, only two days after the fatal shooting and the protest-turned-riot, twenty-four officers had been injured, 150 people arrested, and forty cars set ablaze. Although almost two decades had past, just as in 2005 the same tactics were deployed by the state. Riot police, gendarmes, and the national police and counterterrorism forces of the Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion (RAID) and Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) were deployed for weeks throughout France.
Just as the riots of 2023 appear as a simple repeat of 2005, perhaps Athena gives us the same impression when seen after La Haine. Yet many things have changed. As the film continues, we come to find one of the brothers is watching BFMTV in order to see what is going on outside their banlieue. BFMTV is a 24/7 news channel. As such, some of the information it passes on is incorrect and can lead to disinformation and manipulation of information. Critics have described the news channel as manipulating the information to make it more extreme to attract more viewers. This is amplified by the broadcasting on a loop of a few videos or pictures that are used to emphasise the sensationalism of the information. BFMTV invites experts onto the set to give analyses and explanations of a situation. It is a great opportunity for these experts, who are usually not famous (yet), as it allows them to find a way to express themselves and gain popularity. Other critics accuse BFMTV of frequently inviting Florian Philippot when he was vice president of the Front National, the same far-right party that nominated Marine Le Pen to take on incumbent President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 presidential election. Critics maintain that there are risks of propaganda by the news channel. Unlike in 1995, the hate that gives rise to hate not only comes from within a given system, but from everywhere. The problem is made complex thanks in no small part to misinformation, fake news, bias, and the continual perpetuation of ignorance around the rampant Islamophobia endemic to French society. Where skinheads and racism are no new phenomenon, the power and positioning of the most extreme xenophobes has painted an entirely new picture for us to view.
France is a majority-white nation, but its, as well as more generally throughout Europe, demographics are changing. According to a 2016 survey, 70.7% of the respondents considered themselves exclusively white. This is striking as, until recently, most French citizens would not simply identify as white. Far-right, racist organisations, whose explicit political agenda is to uphold and advance white supremacy, have reclaimed whiteness as a positive racial identity. Charles Mills points out that the failure to examine white supremacy holds it in place.
There are no Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Roma, or Whites in France. Everyone is expected to be an unhyphenated citizen. Race is absent from official discourse as a category of analysis, and the census does not collect racial and ethnic data. The ban on the collection of so-called ‘ethnic data’ is an essential component of French whiteness, as it prevents the government and civil society from using their knowledge of racial inequalities and oppression towards redistributive ends. Thus, whiteness is seen as a Republican universalism in France.
Under the identity of Arab/Muslim or Maghrebi, people from a wide range of ethnic and religious backgrounds are seen as part of a group that is different from the rest of society. The public and legal debates operate under the paradigms of colour blindness, secularism, and universalism, yet the systematic targeting of Islamic practises, from the headscarf to halal food, betrays its xenophobic and racist underpinnings. In France, the Arab or Muslim presence has long been unwelcomed and the target of blame and violence. In France, Islam is central to the definition of whiteness, where the latter has been recast in contrast to Muslimness.
The film’s ending has a resonance that carries on through the final credits. Is the fight from within, does hate give rise to hate, or can hate simply be a tool? Is the struggle in the banlieues, within the community, between the community and the state (and time-honoured tradition in modern France) or could hate simply be being used by others to provoke artificial conflict between parties that would otherwise be capable of harmonising? Gavras ends his film very deliberately to wake the audience up to the fact that the far right is on the rise, and how the tactics they use will push France to civil war. Gavras explains that he has a feeling that ‘we live in a time when information is so confusing. Throughout the film, you hear the news saying something, and the kids are not believing it because there is such disbelief and suspicion of information in general. So, it is very easy these days for a group to pull off a false flag coup or operation’. It was important for Gavras to show that, because of this overflow of information and disinformation, people do not know who to trust, and many nefarious actors, in France and beyond, are skilled at using this confusion to its own benefit and ends.
While the shock factor of the film is successful in staying in the minds of the audience beyond their viewing, what is most interesting to note is how events in the news can reignite flames doomed to extinguish themselves over time. The power of Athena comes not in its cinematography, which largely relies on a viewer’s tastes, or even its successful use of spectacle and shock, but in how insightfully its art imitated reality. It is often the objective of many artists to have their work reach such a feat, but in viewing the differences of opinion between those who viewed the film in 2022 and those watching it as chaos continued to unfold on the streets of Paris in 2023, one must ask is it the filmmaker or the screenwriter’s keen eye or Frances inability to cope with our contemporary times that saw to this successful imitation. Whether we laugh or applaud at the end of Athena, it is critical that we ask why such banal violence flourishes in our times.