Police station, Abdel, an Algerian-born policeman is trying to mediate between the demands of his brothers and neighborhood residents and the police over the death of a 13-year-old boy.

The other brother Karim throws a firebomb inside the station and organizes a raid of tools and weapons.

A civil war begins between the Athena neighborhood and the police.

Pressing rhythms, action, powerful music, new and old generations, fundamentalism, delinquency, religions, social, television.

Athena, an unusual name for a neighborhood/banlieau, chosen by Gavras as the title of the film: the Greek mythological figure is the symbol of wisdom, rationality, but also of the arts and battle strategy. The warrior and virgin goddess, when in a rage she can become ruthless.

And ruthless becomes the war even within the neighborhood, where towering concrete buildings are divided into inaccessible zones such as B7 and B9.

Weapons and drugs are routinely hidden here, and the arrival of the police makes it necessary to find more hiding places.

Even the older siblings of Idir, the 13-year-old boy allegedly killed by the police, disagree with each other; there are those who seek mediation, those who think only of business, those who chase riot, and those who pathologically grow flowers while internalizing hatred and thirst for revenge. Meanwhile, the area must be evacuated and the families removed.

It is necessary to kidnap a policeman in order to get those responsible for the murder of the very young Idir in return.

The film's pace becomes increasingly deafening, and after Karim's death, Gavras succeeds in giving the sweeping, soaring film a less mainstream feel.

A Netflix home product of great quality this film, it will be released exclusively on the platform.

The script's plot twists are quite surprising, and Karim's words from the first part will prove foreboding: "never believe social and TV"-things are hardly as they appear through the media.

Cinematic themes about France seem in recent years to be mostly inspired by civil wars between marginality and institutions.

Interminable sequence plans, slow motion, drones, aim for spectacularity, while the gap between social injustice, lack of integration, and rising anger are circumscribed to pure revenge.

The director's Greek background leads back to the themes of Greek myth and tragedy, albeit in a more spectacular and less complex way than the plots envisioned by the artistic tradition.

One need only reread The Seven Against Thebes to grasp the conceptual and structural abyss of Aeschylus' work.

The police have only one face that of a frightened boy with nail polish and twins at home; that of the banlieues has countless faces, all with the same dulled gaze and thirst for revenge.

If the culprit is social media and the dangerous misinterpretation and instrumentalization of facts, so the film's script seems to confirm, then no one is guilty and the values of freedom, fraternity and equality so much invoked as early as 1789 are words devoid of any meaning supplanted only by the superficiality of a fight without reason and without a future.

06-Jul-2023 by Beatrice