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Athena, the newest movie from music video director Romain Gavras, is a one-trick pony, however that trick is so formally dazzling that the film is an enrapturing expertise. Composed of a number of prolonged, labyrinthine takes spaced out by historically edited scenes, it follows three French-Algerian brothers in Paris — younger and middle-aged adults from totally different walks of life — thrown into disarray within the quick aftermath of a harrowing household tragedy.

Their youngest sibling, a baby named Idir, has been murdered, and the culprits caught on digital camera look like French police. The oldest brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), is a drug and weapons trafficker who solely appears out for himself. Middle brother Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a profession soldier devoted to conserving order. The most flammable piece of the puzzle, nonetheless, is the youngest surviving brother, Karim (Sami Slimane), a charismatic chief with mournful, sunken eyes, who sparks a riot in his housing mission that rapidly spreads throughout the town.

The movie’s introductory sequence units the stage for quite a few spectacular tableaus of state violence and anti-fascist rebellion, every of which begins as a private portrait earlier than pulling out to disclose a much bigger image. It opens throughout a stilted police press convention about Idir’s killing, the place Abdel occurs to be current and in uniform. The scene ignites when a gaggle of indignant demonstrators lobs a Molotov cocktail on the pulpit. The subsequent unbroken take lasts greater than 10 minutes.

Photo: Netflix

Though the sequence begins in a extremely sterilized setting, it quickly explodes into white-knuckle chaos, following Karim and dozens of different black-clad protesters as they not solely commandeer weapons and police automobiles, however drive them throughout the town in a high-octane chase, again to the makeshift fort they’ve constructed on the Athena housing complicated (named, fittingly, for the Olympian goddess of battle technique).

This eruption, it appears, was a very long time coming. Rather than retreading and reexplaining the encircling politics — as within the United States, police killings of civilians and the next protests have dominated headlines in France for years — Athena opens throughout a wide ranging climax that continues for almost all of its 97 minutes. What we’re witnessing in watching Athena is the beginning of an inevitable struggle.

Gavras captures it with cranes, drones, and methods that defy logic, and frames it with tons of upon tons of of extras in winding and large patterns. It’s tactile, but ethereal. The digital camera dips between automobiles, capturing them from throughout the road like passing chariots, then rides up alongside them and dives inside them with the characters, earlier than pulling again out once more to seize the head-spinning scale of the uproar.

Gavras’ body on the motion fees from one second of violent resistance to the following at breakneck pace, hinting at how widespread this furor already is by the point the movie begins. But the staging of this opening scene additionally serves a second perform. It offers us the lay of the land, an in depth sense not simply of the film’s visible and emotional texture, however of the streets between the police station and Athena, the place numerous onlookers line the rooftops and cheer Karim on, and the place the remainder of the story is ready to unfold. Before lengthy, neighboring housing initiatives announce their allegiance to Athena, like kingdoms becoming a member of the fray in Middle-earth.

Photo: Netflix

Rarely has a film so mimicked the sensation of using a rollercoaster, with peaks and valleys that construct to rushes of adrenaline, rigorously resetting earlier than every subsequent drop. Abdel and Karim lead opposing fees, as tides of SWAT groups invade fortified buildings filled with rioters. Meanwhile, their half-brother Moktar weaves out and in of each plots, defending his enterprise pursuits at first, when he could possibly be aiding both facet. The three brothers symbolize sides of French society in microcosm: the oppressor, the oppressed, and the moneyed third events who profit both approach, whether or not or not they grow to be concerned. Their symbolism results in a streamlined story that sidesteps the necessity for an excessive amount of exposition about who, what, or why.

The story is straightforward, however it runs the chance of being too easy. By throwing the viewers headfirst into the mayhem, Gavras obscures among the extra simple emotional materials. Athena facilities on a vicious killing, and the next plot performs like a magnified externalization of grief that, after quite a few such state-sanctioned executions, has grown uncontainable. But the viewers is rarely afforded the prospect to ruminate on this grief, or to really really feel it by means of the brothers’ eyes. Even although the movie often slows right down to depict tender moments of communal mourning within the trio’s Muslim neighborhood (together with a fleeting encounter with the brothers’ mom), there’s no pause to get to know the brothers outdoors their prescribed roles as symbols for bigger unrest.

That mentioned, whereas the movie seldom dramatizes their emotional wounds, this symbolic depiction additionally lends itself to the aesthetic method Gavras has employed all through his profession. While Gavras has made two different narrative options (Our Day Will Come and The World is Yours), he’s finest identified for his blistering music movies, significantly M.I.A.’s “Born Free,” which sees militarized police systematically searching redheads in a fantasy-racism situation, and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” which options among the most hanging imagery of fiery protest in widespread media.

Athena performs like a characteristic model of the visible fixations in these movies — compressed tales the place brutal state violence is a preexisting situation whose root diagnoses are an afterthought, however whose terminal signs Gavras explores in stark, visceral hues. (The movie can also be, in subtler methods, a successor to Gavras’ video for “Signature” by his late buddy DJ Mehdi, a vivid depiction of a suburban neighborhood the place the digital camera captures element and lived expertise by transferring by means of communal areas.)

Athena is arguably a style-over-substance film, given how little time and a spotlight it devotes to the non-public drama underlying its politics. But in Gavras’ arms, the type can also be the substance, with a restrained classicism giving approach to baroque staging as every lengthy take accelerates. Scenes construct in ways in which really feel each narratively inevitable and visually prophetic. Gavras and cinematographer Matias Boucard appear to be exploring the hidden dimensions of those police-and-protester clashes by means of motion — not solely the motion of their topics, however the motion of their digital camera, which tilts and turns as if to seize each potential vantage. Speed the movie up any additional, and also you’re left with one thing approaching cubist artwork, with dimensions and views virtually overlapping amid all of the pandemonium.

Photo: Netflix

The rehearsed nature of every lengthy take isn’t only a neat gimmick, the best way it arguably is in Sam Mendes’ 1917, a struggle movie whose fake one-take design loses perspective on the characters’ environment, inflicting its pressure to dissipate. Instead, the choreography in Athena is its personal symphony, inserting the residing, respiration particulars of the brothers’ surroundings in its crosshairs with each flip, because it builds to moments of darkness swiftly consumed by flame. Thick smoke and flying embers quickly grow to be its default lingua franca, as if it have been an up-tempo remix of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. The music, by Gavras’ personal collaborative mission Gener8ion, combines booming, Hans Zimmer-esque percussion with operatic vocalizations in a hard and fast state of crescendo. The music, just like the picture, hardly ever stops transferring or progressing, however round every nook lies some new and shocking confrontation, so it by no means loses steam.

Gavras shot Athena with IMAX cameras, which makes it all of the extra ripe for viewing as an arresting visible spectacle at first. (Its stateside theatrical launch, sadly, was restricted to per week on one New York display screen.) That mentioned, a small-screen viewing on Netflix remains to be more likely to really feel emotionally charged, since one other key ingredient is the filmmaker Ladj Ly, who co-wrote Athena with Gavras and producer Elias Belkeddar. Ly was the director behind the 2019 Les Misérables, a contemporary retelling of the Victor Hugo novel that was nominated for Best International Feature Film on the 92nd Academy Awards. Like Athena, it zeroes in on tensions between French police and communities of colour, and it equally results in climactic eruptions.

His tackle Les Misérables is a incredible movie, and whereas his method is extra measured (and arguably extra nuanced) than Athena’s, combining Ly’s neighborhood focus with Gavras’ audacious, mile-a-minute stylings ends in a handful of quiet moments. These punctuate the turmoil, permitting temporary however risky respites. Before the viewers is aware of it, the characters are again into the fray, right into a chaotic world that threatens to eat them. And their very own irrepressible fury is simply as harmful. With Athena, Gavras transforms that anger into residing dioramas which are so technically jaw-dropping that they grow to be emotionally rousing too.

Athena streams on Netflix starting Sept. 23.