Netflix’s ‘Athena’ Has the Most Incredible Scene of the Year

The first scene of ‘Athena’ will leave you speechless. The film directed by Romain Gavras has landed among the Netflix movies with much less fanfare than other titles like ‘Blonde’, but ignoring it would be a mistake: it is one of the best movies of the year released on the platform and, in addition, , offers us an impressive opening scene that is already among the best sequence shots in the history of cinema. For something, in his review of ‘Atenea’ from the Venice Festival, Manu Yáñez pointed out that this start is a “clear statement of intent from a filmmaker willing to shake up the stalls”. Or, now, the living room.

It all starts with a close-up of Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a French soldier whom we follow to a press conference where he reveals that his thirteen-year-old brother Idir has been killed by the police. He assures that the authorities will search for those responsible, although they do not seem identifiable in the video of the moment that has gone viral and has infuriated the country. The shot finally opens and we see the media crowding around them, but the camera flies over their heads to a group of young people piled up in the background, and especially to the serious face of Karim (Sami Slimane) , another of the deceased teenager’s brothers. The camera lowers towards his hands and we see that he is preparing a Molotov cocktail, which he throws into the crowd and unleashes chaos in the room..

With an absolutely brilliant choreography, the camera continues recording without having cut a single second while the dozens of young people storm the police station and take the weapons, as well as a police van that they use to escape towards the barricade that they have created in their neighborhood, Atenea . The war has begun in this area of ​​the poor suburbs of Paris. In an almost miraculous way, the camera has managed to move with the protagonists from the police station to inside the vehicle, and from there inside the building complex inhabited mostly by immigrants fed up with the mistreatment of the French authorities and institutions.

The camera follows Karim as he organizes the “troops” and the sequence ends, after eleven intense minutes without cuts, with an absolutely epic aerial shot.

In addition to a show of technical strength and visual invention, the first sequence of ‘Atenea’ offers us a whole lesson in film narrative. In a matter of minutes, the film introduces us to the two central characters, who are two brothers who share tragedy but differ in how to act in the face of it, places us in the space where the entire story will unfold (Atenea’s neighborhood) and sets the tone and visual style that the story will have. It is not a typical sequence shot whose only function is to leave us speechless, but rather it serves a purpose in the story and takes advantage of all its tools to serve as the perfect introduction to what is to come.

For director Romain Gavras, it was also a way of capturing the audience’s attention streaming. “It’s the first time I’ve made a film for a platform and for Netflix in particular. And when we were writing with Ladj Ly [coguionista y productor] We thought we needed to start really strong because even when I watch a Netflix movie, if it’s not interesting in the first five minutes, I’m gone.”said in one interview with vultureacknowledging that, “when you make a theatrical film, you can take your time because people aren’t going to start leaving until after minute ten or fifteen.”

However, it is hard to believe that such a titanic effort as this was only due to the desire to catch the public from the living room. In fact, the story, which is essentially a Greek tragedy between brothers and in the middle of a war, calls for the epic and solemnity that this initial shot brings. The director has cited titles such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s ‘I Am Cuba’ and Sergei Bondarchuk’s ‘War and Peace’ to ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Citizen Kane’ as influences for the film, and compares Karim organizing the revolution to Russell Crowe in Russell Crowe’s ‘Gladiator’ (via Vulture). The influence of the style of Ly, director of the acclaimed ‘Les Miserables’, is also appreciated. In fact, these young people on the barricades of a poor neighborhood in Paris could well be the rebels of Victor Hugo’s novel in the 21st century.

In the end, the secret to the success of this incredible opening shot was repeat, repeat, repeat. No cheating or cardboard. First assistant director Amin Harfouch explains in Vulture: “The difficulty was choreographing everything and making everything look as natural as possible, a perfect symbiosis of all the different trades: actors, extras, doubles, special effects, camera. The synergy had to be perfect. And for that there is no secret, you have to rehearse, repeat and repeat. Rigor and discipline were the keywords.”

The results are for everyone to see and are available from September 23 on Netflix. ‘Athena’ is an essential film. As Yáñez pointed out in his criticism: “With one foot in pop-verité aesthetics and the other in Greek tragedy, Gavras and Ly create a work of upheaval that passes the social tensions of contemporary France through a sensory and immersive magnifying lens.“. A controlled chaos that immerses us in a journey where the visual and narrative possibilities of cinema seem more exciting than ever.