Spoilers follow for the Romain Gavras film Athena and the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.
The French police and military point their guns at men, women, and children alike in a run-down urban neighborhood that is physically close to but economically distant from a number of wealthier communities. These people’s movements are curtailed by checkpoints built around their homes, and their language (Arabic) and religion (Islam) are discouraged, too. But the paratroopers and patrolmen are unbothered by the bigotry they have signed up to defend: “France is your motherland … Work with us,†they order the victims of this discrimination, and the fact that they expect obedience speaks to the smug indoctrination of power.
All of this — the barbed wire, the weapons, the condescending attempt at comfort — fuels the state of oppression and fear in which these “unpeople,†per British historian Mark Curtis’s definition (“those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gainâ€) have lived for decades. And while this scene could easily be from Romain Gavras’s Netflix film Athena, which follows an uprising in a French housing project, it’s actually a key moment in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers. Athena isn’t exactly a modern-day The Battle of Algiers — Gavras leans a little too agit-pop for that, while Pontecorvo’s depiction of the Algerian rebellion against French colonizers skewed closer to documentary. But Athena is full of elements that evoke the older film, from arguments about violence’s effectiveness as political strategy to the humanization of Algerian and Muslim men and women too often targeted by French government policies. If The Battle of Algiers’s “France is your motherland … Work with us†line could easily be heard in Athena, then Athena’s “It’s about proving to them it’s no good anymore, assuming we’re the victims†could be from The Battle of Algiers. The two complement each other, and the conversation they create about the long-lasting impact of colonial structures and the ensuing morass of nationality versus ethnicity is as illuminating as it is rare.
Athena dives into these considerations from the very beginning. In that wild 11-minute opening, Gavras and co-writers Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly establish the police murder of 13-year-old Idir (Mohamed Amri) and introduce two of the three brothers who will butt heads over how to react to Idir’s death. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), despite his Algerian ancestry, is an extension of the French empire; he’s served in the system, and he believes in it. As a member of the French military, he’s complimented for following in the footsteps of his Algerian Fusilier grandfather and representing “a family that has repeatedly fought for our country.†Abdel recently served in Mali (another African country seized by French rule, like Algeria), and he accepts the police’s promise that they will find whoever killed Idir and bring them to justice.
Younger brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is far less trusting. In the 24 hours since the video of Idir’s death went viral, he’s transformed into a revolutionary, gathering dozens of fellow teens from the Athena housing project, encouraging them to build up barricades around the buildings using trashed furniture and stolen cars, and leading them into an assault on the police station that interrupts Abdel’s calls for peace at a press conference. “Until those pigs are nicked, it’s war,†Karim swears. Athena contextualizes these lines of division with snippets of news footage that tell us Idir’s death is the third case of police misconduct in France in two months, and right-wing militias have been gaining influence, seemingly thanks to police looking the other way. And while Karim barks out orders for the teens and Abdel liaises with the projects’ heavily Muslim community on how they can peacefully evacuate, their eldest half-brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug dealer, shows no interest in anything but where to hide his product. With dirty cops in his pocket, Moktar rejects both the idealism of Abdel and the insurgency of Karim. His priority is individual survival, and he scoffs at collective action.
In these three brothers, Athena presents an array of immigrant experiences: Abdel’s service-as-assimilation, Karim’s rebellion-as-self-actualization, and Moktar’s capitalism-as-ideology. Amidst the neon flares, the operatic score, and the extra-wide shots that present Athena as a castle to be won, these brothers dig deep into arguments about the efficacy of terrorism as a means of persuasion — much like the sparring among members of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) in The Battle of Algiers.
This similarity is clearest in a scene about midway through Athena, after Karim has taken a police officer hostage and hidden him within Athena’s mazelike interior. The police and counterterrorism units Abdel has agreed to work with insist that it wasn’t cops who killed Idir, and ask him to retrieve the abductee from within Athena and diffuse the situation. When Abdel finally makes it through shadowy tunnels to Karim, his attempt at reconciliation starts dismissively (“Playtime’s overâ€) and sparks long-standing tensions between the brothers. A hug becomes an attack as an enraged Karim says of Abdel, “You’re a puppet and a traitor and nothin’ more. You’re a harki, that’s all you are! Don’t come here acting the big brother when someone dies. All you are is a pussy in uniform for France.†The specific use of the term “harki†— a reference to an Algerian who sided with the French during the Algerian War, instead of standing alongside those who wanted independence — places the film alongside The Battle of Algiers in its deliberate prodding of the ways colonial rule complicated and compromised religion, language, ethnicity, and nationality.
To Karim, Abdel helping the military maintain French rule is a broad betrayal, and his working with the police is a personal one. No matter that there are Black and brown cops involved in the siege on Athena — how could Abdel make that choice, and genuinely believe that it was righteous? The film explodes Karim’s sense of betrayal in this argument scene, but it festers long before: in the attack at the police station, when Karim ignores Abdel’s calls for calm; when mourners gather to pray for Idir, and Abdel’s presence feels like an affront. The teens’ tactics, with their glowing flare guns and revving motorcycles and coordinated tracksuits, might seem immature. But the feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement playing out on Slimane’s impossible-to-look-away-from face are tangible and genuine. So much so that by the time another group of cops kills Karim in front of Abdel, they destroy the older brother’s sense of morality, too.
Gavras devotes one of his long takes to Benssalah as he plays the grieving Abdel, and the despair and nihilism the character slips into is less a knee-jerk rejection of that “harki†term and more an understanding that Karim’s resentments were justified. Abdel blows up Athena once the police insist that the conflict should end because they weren’t directly responsible for Idir’s death (they also admit they have no interest in tracking down the right-wing activists who did commit the crime), a decision that goes back to Curtis’s definition of “unpeople.†The people of Athena are “the modern equivalent of the savages of colonial days, excluded from systems of justice and rights.†Karim’s understanding of that reality and willingness to do something about it is a modern-day version of the ruthlessness and commitment captured in The Battle of Algiers.
Pontecorvo’s film was released in 1966, four years after the official end of the eight-year conflict between the French who had ruled Algeria for 132 years and the Algerians who, intrigued by communism and nationalism and inspired by the Viet Minh’s success against the French in the First Indochina War, began a resistance movement. The war was generally divided between the French and other Europeans who benefited from freedom of movement, more stable jobs, and could vote, and the Muslim Algerians, who had no government representation, were confined to poorer neighborhoods, and were mostly treated as a lower class. As the French police and military and the Algerian FLN fought, the former used torture tactics and the latter guerrilla ones, with civilians and harkis (most of whom had joined the French out of economic necessity rather than colonialist loyalty, according to French historian Pierre Daum) caught in between. At the time, international media tended to side with the French (in 1957, the New York Times called Algeria a “rebellion-torn landâ€), though the estimated number of Algerian casualties (1.5 million) dwarfed that of French casualties (29,000, according to historian Martin Evans’s Algeria: France’s Undeclared War.) The French also secretly massacred Algerians, even in Paris, and abandoned the harkis who fought alongside them, barring many of them from leaving the country after the war and leaving them to face retaliatory violence. Evans notes that the number of Algerian citizens who were killed or disappeared remains unknown (he cites an estimate of 55,000 to 65,000).
The Battle of Algiers worked to alter that biased perspective by focusing on three years of the war, 1954 to 1957, and devoting as much attention to the FLN as it gave to the French paratroopers led by Lt. Col. Philippe Mathieu (portrayed by French actor Jean Martin, who in 1960 signed the Manifesto of the 121, a statement from academics, artists, and writers arguing that the Algerians had a “right to disobedienceâ€). In the hands of co-writers Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas, the based-on-reality Battle of Algiers didn’t diminish the FLN’s violence; it recreates their bombings of civilian spaces and assassinations of military figures. But it also allowed group leaders to argue about their tactics and voice the reasoning for their choices, and showed us the constant degradation they suffered at the hands of the French. The film’s black-and-white, newsreel-style minimalism made the atrocities that much starker: bodies carried out of an Algerian apartment building bombed by the French, the French smashing in doors to drag out Algerians on a general strike, the blood and tears on the tortured Algerians’ bodies.
In response, the FLN and its supporters aren’t an amorphous mass. They’re people whose motivations are clearly laid out, like Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), whose lengthy criminal record reflects a life of subjugation (punished for being a draft dodger and for insulting a police officer) and whose expression, after being tripped and attacked by a group of sneering French, could set the world on fire:
Pontecorvo himself plays real-life FLN leader Larbi Ben M’hidi, who officially died by suicide while in French custody, although a believable counternarrative posits that he was tortured to death. In this scene, the captured M’hidi answers journalists’ questions about the FLN’s pivot to terrorism in the face of an occupying force, and the space allowed for his political ideology is a clear sign of the filmmakers’ respect.
Athena connects to The Battle of Algiers visually and thematically. The latter includes a secret wedding between Algerians who didn’t want to be married in front of the French government; Athena includes a Muslim memorial service held in private, away from the prying eyes of French media looking for another way into the story on Idir. The Battle of Algiers showed via jarringly edited closeups the French paratroopers’ shock-and-awe tactics in the Algerian casbah, how they terrorized women and children and left bodies in the street; Athena goes overhead to show a group of Muslim men leaving the compound being surrounded, insulted, and attacked by riot gear-wearing cops for whom the residents’ religion is an inherent sign of guilt.
Athena’s controversial ending reveals a trio of neo-Nazis as responsible for Idir’s death. That might lead some to believe that Gavras is absolving the authorities, but focusing on that final sequence discredits the environment of police-supported repression that Gavras otherwise establishes. Consider what the police say to Abdel when he demands they do their jobs and find the men responsible: “It’s over†and “They don’t exist,†an explicit abdication that feels like an implicit alliance with the murderers. Who decides who gets to be French, and who is called on to maintain the barriers of that identity? In the world of Athena, imperialism and Islamophobia, colonialism and classism are all bedfellows, and standing up against them is an immense act of courage. “Acts of violence don’t win wars. Neither wars, nor revolutions … The people themselves must act,†M’hidi says in The Battle of Algiers. Athena’s depiction of such action honors Pontecorvo’s masterpiece with its own amalgam of defiance and empathy.
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