Riot Time

 "Athena,”a film by Romain Garvas, 2022

This film might have been inspired by the 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues (suburbs). Those started over the deaths of 3 youths who fled police and hid in an electric sub-station in Clichy, only to be electrocuted. 3 weeks of rioting followed – attacks on police cars, arrests, fires set by mostly Arab youth sick of unemployment, poverty and police harassment in their housing estates.

In this film, it starts in the aftermath of the supposed police killing of a 13-year-old Arab boy. In revenge, a well-organized group of youth led by one of the dead boys' brothers engage in a successful assault on a police station. This film is a graphic depiction of the attack on that police station and the subsequent occupation of a concrete housing estate called 'Athena.' It shows different currents within the African, Arab and Algerian towers – angry youth rioters, religious elders urging calm and evacuation, civilian women and children leaving and criminal gang members trying to hide weapons and drugs. The young boy has a brother in the French Army and another who leads a drug gang, so it becomes a conflicted and stereo-typed family story of 4 brothers, with ma mere almost invisible.

The younger brother's plan is to capture a CRS riot cop and trade him for the cop perpetrators of the murder, and if not, kill him. What might be a veteran of the Algerian revolution is called upon to help, and he starts planning to blow up one of the towers. It slowly comes to light that the killing of the young boy was orchestrated by a group of French fascists intent on starting a 'race' war. It is alleged they dressed in police uniforms to accomplish the act. They are the ultimate but hidden bad guys here, as a scene at the end of the film verifies that story.

This is mostly an 'action' flick that attempts to show the chaos of a violent revolt – Molotov's and fire, the prodigious use of roman candles and heavy fireworks to shoot at cops; a rain of stones, concrete, a fridge and TVs; physical attacks, CRS batons, shields and helmets, pepper spray and tear gas (which don't seem to work in this movie...), flash-bang grenades – the whole panoply of riot weapons and responses. For people that have never been in these situations, watching this might prepare them. In a way, the camera work and tracking is stylized cinema-verite and arty, which gives it a feel of being movie-like, not real. Though very real fire was used throughout. How the Athenian rebels got ahold of so many fireworks, prior to this unpredictable death, is not explained.  This might also be stylized.

Politically the rage and emotion are ultimately misdirected. The portrayal makes the youth seem over-the-top and only focused on revenge. The brother soldier changing sides is an example of this. This is due to the lack of previous context – the gut reactions of too many viewers might be 'these guys are nuts!' Apartments in the tower are vandalized and walls busted through. Residents' stuff is destroyed. Several floors are blown up. A number of radicals die while elders and youth are arrested. There is no respected or strong political organization in Athena to take leadership – a common problem. So ad hoc rebellion is the result.

Certainly, police stations in many revolts have been burned, including one in Minneapolis during the 2020 Floyd Revolt. That included the defeat of the police on the street. This film's advantage is showing what violent capital has driven some people to, whether you like the results or not.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine” archive, using these terms: “Paris” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Summer on Fire,” “Hinterland,” “Dressed Up For a Riot,” “Tell the Bosses We're Coming,” "The Coming Insurrection," “The Bomb.”

The Cultural Marxist

February 16, 2023