Athena

Arresting one’s attention with a hypnotic 11-minute one-take that opens on a press conference at a police station, navigates through the chaos of a riot, crisscrosses around, inside and through a speeding getaway van, moves into an apartment complex, and finally rests on top of a towering ledge that functions as an outpost for a brief revolution, Athena is, first and foremost, a technical marvel, and subsequently, a story brimming with issues.

Co-screenwriter/director Romain Gavras is the son of Costas Gavras, the director of the Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek-Oscar-winning film Missing, the Dustin Hoffman-John Travolta-starrer Mad City and the Algerian-French political thriller Z. If you know their family’s filmography, you know the young filmmaker has inherited the penchant for telling kinetic, message-laden stories set within an ambience of escalating chaos — and boy, does Athena escalate.

Filmed mostly through a series of long takes (in film lingo they’re called ‘oners’), Athena, we learn, is an apartment complex in France that’s mostly a melting pot for minority representation.

A young Muslim boy from the complex is allegedly killed by the police and his family — and the community — retaliates by besieging their own buildings and turning them into a fortress against the police.

Athena is a technical marvel and has a story brimming with issues while Marilyn Monroe’s real life is merely a reference point for creative liberties in Blonde

Their demands are simple: bring us the unidentified people who killed the boy…and they’re not taking no for an answer.

The riot, which becomes a song for revolution, which the media soon decrees a precursor to civil war, plays shoulder-to-shoulder with a much more intimate story about the collapse of a family.

Athena’s militant-minded commander is Karim (Salim Slimane), a young man brimming with fire, who is barely in his late teens. His elder brother Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a soldier in the French army, and another elder brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) is a drug dealer. Idir, the murdered kid, was the youngest of the lot.

Gavras and co-writers Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly, take a strong approach in their addressing of harrowing, real-world issues about the present state of French society, i.e police violence, racism, apathy and the isolation of Muslims and the migrant underclasses.

These issues are seamlessly woven into the guise of a gritty action film that, somehow, reminds you of the work of Fernando Meirelles, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sidney Lumet and, of course, Costa-Gavras. This, by the way, is excellent company to be a part of.

Despite being a work of utter fiction, Athena’s narrative stance bleeds reality. Like the rebelling youth, Gavras’s storytelling is willfully indignant, with a narrow, almost sniper-like point-of-view of the unfolding events, through which we’re dragged by the collar by his camera.

What one feels is an unforgiving, unforgettable experience of excess. In retrospection, given the very deliberate tone of the story, that’s the only way this film was meant to be perceived. Thoroughly recommended.

Blonde

With its shifting frame sizes and shifty narrative choices, Blonde, written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly) is a superficial, self-important, award season wannabe that willingly chooses to be arthouse trash. Dismissing it as such, however, is too easy.

Based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde is a fictionalised account of the life of one Norma Jean Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe. Like most adaptations of her life, including the novel, it wallows in self-pity. Dominik’s adaptation, though, chooses the life of melancholy, exploitation and excess — and not the good kind Athena indulges in.

I’ve never considered biopics to be invaders of privacy, but with Blonde and its invasive, borderline pornographic approach, one can’t help but think: what is Dominik thinking?

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times sums it up quite eloquently in the opening paragraph of her review:

“Given all the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured during her 36 years — her family tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster homes, spells of poverty, unworthy film roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering attention of insatiable fans — it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities of Blonde, the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.”

Marilyn suffers from daddy issues (she calls most of the men she is involved with ‘daddy’), cries a lot and has a lot of sex. Working up her way from nude modelling jobs, to being raped by studio executives, to giving fellatio to a president, we see her sanity unravelling. Twice, Dominik films going into the actress’s private parts with several shots of her growing foetus. One wonders whether the perverse nature stems from Dominik’s own, kinky perception of an actress who was known for her sexual appeal, or from the novel by Oates.

To put the film into perspective, I had to revisit the two-parter adaptation made for CBS in 2001. The two are basically the same film, so one can assume that Dominik is sticking to the material, even if he is taking his creative liberties while making the scenes themselves. However, the made-for-TV film didn’t have the excess of sex and nudity — though, one wonders if that was a restriction of the medium.

Both adaptations are messy and overlong though — in fact, Oates’ novel itself is over 700 pages — so no matter how one sees it, Marilyn’s real life is merely a reference point for creative liberties when one thinks about Blonde in any of its iterations.

This film is mostly a showcase of Anna de Armas’ fine playacting of Marilyn, but one never gets to see the real person, her intelligence, or any shred of her humanity, amidst the creative chaos.

Streaming on Netflix, both Athena and Blonde are rated suitable only for viewers ages 18 and over

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 9th, 2022