Athena: Romain Gavras' cinematic tour de force
The French filmmaker's last movie is an impressive technical and visual masterpiece
French cinema tends to evolve by waves. It’s not a linear exercise where you can feel creators edging towards a new esthetic; it’s a collection of redundant and even boring screenplays shot using classic techniques exploited ad nauseum, disrupted by the occasional burst of creativity that heralds a new era. It’s Godard jump-cutting his way into the nouvelle vague, or Mathieu Kassovitz creating revolutionary shots in La haine (The Hate).
France benefits (or suffers) from a centralized education and cultural system, a bureaucratic hydra that dictates top-down what the next curriculum or screenplay will be. I’ll probably write about this in the future, since there are historical and revolutionary reasons for this sad state of affairs. However, the post-war model that survives to this day seems like an ill-fitted approach to making art in the distributed online era. When you have a centralized committee made up of old has-been directors choosing what the next year’s French cinema is going to look like, you get the usual dreck of French movies: some variation of college professor/writer/artist living in the insufferable bourgeois neighborhoods of Paris has an affair with a young marxist/feminist deconstructivist painter or something; they’re all depressed and smoke gaulois cigarettes while blabbing about the politics of May ‘68. That’s pretty much all of French drama movies, right there. Sometimes, you might get a cool flick like Audiard’s De battre, mon coeur s’est arrêté (Come on, France: what’s with the titles?), but in general, you’ll wind up slouched half-bored in the movie theater, wondering how many more minutes of torture you have to endure.
This is probably the state of cinema worldwide, I have no idea. The truth is, the best French cinema is the one you can watch outside of France, once curators have gone through the godawful catalog and chosen the five or six movies worth projecting in Tribeca or Camden town for local hipsters.
No wonder the best movies in French to come out in the last decade were shot by the brothers Dardenne of Belgium (whose movies you should absolutely watch, all of them), Michael Haneke of Austria or Felix Van Groeningen (also Belgian).
Outsiders in French cinema, like Quentin Dupieux, Gaspar Noé or Leos Carax, are famous for complaining about financing and budget issues. I honestly don’t know how Dupieux gets anything made, although in my very personal opinion, if you shot the opening scene for “Rubber” you should just be allowed to shoot whatever else you want, just for the lulz. You earned it.
Romain Gavras never had it easy: son of film legend Costa Gavras, he decided early on to take a different approach to filmmaking. He cut his teeth in the music video scene, where he founded production company Kourtrajmé and produced some of the most important work for the French market. Even though their style was heavily US-influenced, they established all the codes of French hip-hop in their clip Pour ceux, shot almost 20 years ago. Absolutely every French rapper has copied or been inspired by that clip ever since.
Romain Gavras developed his music video style through highly creative, post-Tarantino gore collaborations, like M.I.A.’s Born Free, Justice’s Stress or Jamie XX’s Gosh, to name but a few.
Now, after perfecting his craft for years, he’s delivered Athena, a staggering technical tour-de-force.
I’m not going to comment on the script, so don’t worry, this is spoilers-free. I’ll just say the story is far from being the film’s strong suit. I wouldn’t even pay attention to it, to be honest. The character development is flat, the mood swings are incoherent, and the plot twists are laughable. All this to say that Athena isn’t the movie to end all movies, far from that. Watch The Northman instead, if story-driven cinema is your thing.
However, I will say the opening scene of Athena is an absolute must-watch. It’s well worth the whole film; even if you’re not keen on watching the whole thing, give yourself 10 minutes and watch what is no short of a masterpiece.
There are a couple of movies like this, where the opening scene is way better than what comes next. Saving Private Ryan, for example, automatically comes to mind: I’ve rewatched the opening scene many times, but I couldn’t care less for Matt Damon and the silly, über-gringo macho story. The opening of Inglorious Basterds is another one: the vertical travelling to reveal the hidden jews is a nerve-chilling shot. It’s really better than the whole movie: that should have been a short ;-p
Why am I raving about Athena? Basically, because I spent the whole of last week racking my brains, trying to figure out how the hell Romain Gavras had shot the opening sequence. I finally found the making-of and some interviews by the director, so I gleefully tuned in and boy, was I in for a surprise…
Coming from a music video background, Gavras approaches the movie as a series of travelling shots. That’s why the screenplay is so flimsy: he’s trying to knit together this behemoth of a thing he’s created, and sometimes it just doesn’t add up. But that’s not a problem: you can watch Athena at any point and still be dazzled by the filmmaking.
After having figured out the choreography and actor’s movement in a decor where half the stuff is on fire, people are shot at with firecrackers and extras are running full speed through smoke and debris, Romain Gavras decided to get creative with the camera movement, too.
This is where the movie makes its biggest contribution, where all its value should be adjudicated: the intricate, complex camera movement that required many technicians coordinating at the same time.
The opening scene takes us into a truck (à la Children of Men), before following the camera as it exits the moving truck, seems to hover around, and comes back into the truck again. It’s obviously not a drone, since you can’t have a drone blowing the actor’s hair all over the place inside a truck. How did he pull this off? To add insult to injury, the last shot of the opening scene sees the camera… glide off a wall, spin and look back at the actors. The first one was complicated, but how on earth did he shoot that one?!? I was flabbergasted.
It turns out, the car sequence features two sets of cameramen passing the camera, without cutting, onto a moving scooter. The scooter drives around, shoots, and then is passed to the people in the truck again, in the same shot (this, after you’ve already shot 5 minutes non-stop inside the police station).
However, Gavras is not finished: once they get to the neighborhood, the camera follows the actors as they weave in and out of the action, before being attached to a drone while shooting, only to keep the drone off (to avoid all that breeze) until the last minute, when they turn it on, chuck it into the sky and watch if fly off.
Brilliant. I could go on about the other shots he managed to get: attaching the steadycam operator to a crane and pulling him up in the air mid-sequence, another beauty. But you can follow all of it in the making of.
So do yourselves a favor: when you have a chance, just check out the first 10 minutes of Athena on Netflix. You won’t be disappointed.