"Athena" and "Blonde," Netflix Releases Under Siege
Critics responded lukewarm to hostile for these two recently released films. Are they correct in roasting the streaming giant are just continuing their rivalry?
Athena (2022, Romain Gavras, France) has one of the greatest opening shots of all time. In one long, uninterrupted, eleven-minute shot, it sets up the main characters, setting, and mood. It begins at the police headquarters where a soldier, Abdel (Dali Benssalah), speaks at a press conference about his teen-age brother that was killed by police. Then the camera moves into the crowd to show his brother Karim (Sami Slimane), watching intensely before lighting a Molotov and launching it at the police. Then complete zero to one-hundred chaos. A crowd of masked youths storm in and frenetically raid the building. Abdel goes against the crowd looking for Karim. Then we watch Karim move confidently through the building as its being torn apart, looking for weapons and then finding a safe. They take it out of the building and into a police van, speeding off as the riot police are closing in. They book it down the street with a French flag waiving overhead and motorcycles popping wheelies around them. They’re celebrating the small victory they just won while shouting “Athena.” Karim looks on, unfazed, knowing the war that’s about to come. They arrive at the housing complex, which is rigged to withstand a siege, and prepare the multiple points of entry. They take the safe into the building and get to work on opening it with a power saw. They take a snap of the police gun tested on a bulletproof vest. Karim stops them and says there’s no celebrating until they find the names of the feds who killed his brother. Karim walks atop the complex’s impoverished rampart. Youths are running around everywhere preparing the defenses. Karim is singularly focused. Everyone is high on adrenaline. The tragic music swells. He makes it to the edge and the camera flies out horizontally, revealing the castle walls; and then the film’s title appears right before cutting for the first time. That was all one shot.
Everyone with digital cameras can make long one-shots today, but none come close to this in its ability at conveying a short story within the whole. It’s inspiring and moving both in form and content, the latter usually absent from long shots. The rest of the film features longer-than-usual shots like an Iñárritu/Cuarón film, which shows the stand-off between the two sides. The cinematography is beautiful in capturing the chaotic crowd scenes—most of the extras were residents of the real housing complex they filmed—and especially the roman candles and fireworks they use to combat the advance of the police.
The three brothers, Karim, Abdel, and the drug-lord eldest, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), are on opposite sides of the conflict, which marks the air of the film in Greek tragedy. The story sticks to that conceit for the remainder of the film as the emotions surge and stakes increase.
Why Athena? The name of this housing complex comes from the Greek goddess, born via the brow of Zeus after a powerful hammer blow, who specialized in battle strategy and wisdom. Along with twins Apollo and Artemis, Athena was the most militant of the Olympians in their battle against chaotic nature. She was born aggressive, fighting her way out. She was androgynous. She wore heavy masculine armor and wielded Zeus’s spear. Her breastplate is a phallic symbol with iconography of ugly monsters meant to suppress sexual advances. Regarding her trait of wisdom, it was in the direction of crafts and skills rather than mental faculties. She’s resourceful, adaptive, pragmatic, and conspiratorial. Ares is the ravaging god of war while Athena provides war’s aesthetics and techniques. Athena, as patron of Athens, is the wall protecting the people against the enemy, chaotic nature, and with her breastplate, against men.
The Athena housing complex is the wall protecting the youth against the chaotic, masculine energy of a racist, militarized police force. Like Athena, the residents of the complex are born into the aggressive conditions of poverty. Karim is still a teen yet plans the battle with comprehensive focuses on resources and geography as Athena would. He organized the war and repelled an advance of energy that is keeping him and other first-generation foreign-born families in place.
The film forces one to ask, is France all right? The socio-political dimension is toned down in favor of the story action. Nonetheless, the action reveals a bubbling of communal tension that needs to be released somehow. Is the director Romain Gavras, son of the political-thriller filmmaker Costa-Gavras, showing us the tragedy to come, or just showing off? Netflix owns the film and I highly recommend streaming it unless its playing at a theater near you—don’t get your hopes up for Netflix. The shots are magical and would play amazingly on a big screen.
Blonde (2022, Andrew Dominik, USA) is one of the most controversial films to come out in a long time. It’s based on Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, a fictional biography depicting what Oates called her white whale subject, Marilyn Monroe. The most iconic mid-century star, Monroe’s mythic past and saintly present is a life nearly impossible to depict head-on. Better from the side, askew. Oates’s novel does just that. She insisted that her portrayal was highly fictionalized to perform this coup.
Filmmaker Andrew Dominik became interested in adapting the novel many years ago. He’d start pre-production, cast the lead, then it would fall apart several times over. On the set of Killing Them Softly (2012), Brad Pitt became interested when Dominik floated the idea, so he signed on to produce the film through his company, Plan B. Netflix then heard about the Dominik-Pitt-Monroe project, so they agreed to distribute the film. And finally, they landed on Ana de Armas to play Monroe and began production before it could falter—although it did have to halt production for a half-year because of covid.
Blonde is a near-perfect example of a postmodern pastiche film; it endlessly references a past era through its aesthetics and moods rather than depicting any social-realist truth. The motion-picture images in the film are ones we’ve seen from photography stills before—most notably the white dress drifting upward due to a strong current. Much of the film is depicted in the bleakness of sepia and black & white to not just recall the past but be the past. And that’s how Dominic (via Oates) depicts Monroe: her picturesque life, the good, the bad, and the horrifying.
It’s embarrassing seeing the critics decry how a deceptively smart and intelligent woman wasn’t depicted as such. (She was). That’s blotting Monroe’s history, no? Imagine if Moby Dick was a limp pamphlet about a whale’s graceful movements through the Atlantic, its intelligent struggle against blood-thirsty whalers…So Monroe, starting out as a young Norma Jeane in socal, is treated with textual references, by way of The Town-Ho’s Story-like sidelong glances; Norma Jeane fades away from the story and becomes Marilyn Monroe around the same dramatic point that Ishmael dissolves into the Pequod.
Depicting Monroe in the rose-filled microscopes these critics are asking for would’ve done her a tremendous dishonor. Industry insiders trying to absolve their industry from the literal and moral flogging, to say the least, she endured. It’s easy to watch the glamorous Monroe in films showing us her best artistically; it’s about time we stop shielding our eyes from how the pig was slaughtered to produce the sausage. Of course we’d prefer to remember a highly intuitive and beautiful person just as that, on her queenly pedestal like a five-year-old Pickfordite competing at a beauty pageant.
In the nineteen-thirties, Monroe’s mother abused her. In the nineteen-forties, studio execs and casting directors raped Monroe to give her gigs. In the nineteen-fifties, Monroe had an abortion without her full consent. In the nineteen-sixties, Monroe is forcefully addicted to drugs and alcohol after a miscarriage and overdoses in the second year. Throughout all of this, she experiences pangs of patriarchal needs that are projected onto every male figure that comes close, whether she wants it or not. Also, she’s an astute judge of character and excellent close-reader in an era where blonde bombshells had no respect. I can understand wanting to take back the narrative in favor of portraying the victim in a halo of blooming daffodils, but that would require a step too far in the direction of hagiography, revisionism, and anachronism.
Havana-born Ana de Armas as Monroe is the performance of this short decade, even with her accent slipping in parts. It’s impossible not to feel everything she feels as Monroe, which makes the film unbearably difficult at points. One critic wrote that it isn’t so much Armas embodying the spirit of Monroe as the other way around. The ghost supplants Armas so thoroughly that Monroe’s own past is calling to collect the overdue aesthetic debts owed to her. Armas probably wrapped production without having any memories of the previous few months. Bringing her spirit to screen was cinematographer Chayse Irvin and production designer Florencia Martin. The images and spaces Armas pliés through do as much work as Monroe’s spirit. Her portrayal of Monroe is unforgettable and will doubtfully be bettered in the next generation or three.
It'll be interesting to see Blonde’s reception by various cinema bodies around awards’ season. Will HW own up to their injustices or sweep it under the casting couches? Would love to see the HFPA nominate the film in every category to stick it to their American counterparts. When it premiered at Venice last month, the audience applauded for fourteen-minutes—although this is a better measure of their vanity than appreciation, but there was appreciation nonetheless—and Armas broke down in tears. The worst possible afterlife for the film—especially rated NC-17—is to rest on a streamer’s shelf, like Athena, that doesn’t care much for theatrical receptions and regards films as content and not art. But that’s where it now sits and can be passively viewed. Netflix likes a little controversary though, so maybe they’ll go out of their way in defending it.
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