To get to move the masses within a fake Paris that mixes the centre, the Eiffel Tower and the worst of Chinese mass housing (Sky City), working somewhere between the assault on archetypal symbols, the synchronised swimming girls of the musicals with Esther Williams and the human geometries of Michel Gondry’s electronic music videos, takes years of work and refinement on a precise imagery. To have a view as clear as the one Romain Gavras displays in the music video for Gosh by Jamie XX, one must perfectly master that visual universe, those references and be able to film open spaces as well as closed ones. Which, as it happens, are exactly the skills needed to create a Shakespearean epic of the modern metropolis, a Lord Of The Rings that pits angry suburbia with bandanas over the mouths and tracksuits against police officers in riot gear, in other words Romain Gavras’ next film Athena, which will be on Netflix from 23 September. The apotheosis of his career, pure rage on film.
A conflict on an unprecedented scale, shot as if it were a music video, made up of sequence plans and a creative use of drones within a suburban neighbourhood (namely Athena, in Paris). If there is one thing that Gavras has stated through images throughout his career, it is that the architectural aggressiveness and brutality of those places, buildings and areas, imposed by society on those who have less, has ended up affecting the people who live there. Construction has contributed to creating an angry youth that now gathers around those buildings and draws its rebellious strength from them.
So if there is one object that most represents Romain Gavras’ style, it is the Molotov cocktail. A recurring fetish in his music videos that then became part of the films. The perfect symbol of an artist who founded a contemporary aesthetic centred around the rage of the outcast, the suburbs, social housing and a style of clothing that never imitates official fashion but instead is made up of aggressive elements, jumpsuits, chains, bomber jackets and bandanas. The contemporary Kombat Banlieue that bring urban spaces to life in ways that are both familiar and new. Gavras does not found a new mythology of the suburbs, but elevates the one that already exists, the world of streetwear, of street gestures and attitudes, merging it with the buildings, the poorly kept green areas, the graffiti on the walls, the areas that are empty for no reason and the shacks. Everything contributes to creating anger.
His first music video already had it all, I Believe by Simian Mobile Disco, in which a group of guys with faces, bodies and clothing from the suburbs show off, flaunting their swag and the places they live in as if they owned who knows what refined and attractive places. That world is theirs, it represents them and they represent it. It will be a few years later, with Stress by Justice, that Gavras’ ability to frame characters in a landscape would become clear. In that music video made up of gangs, council houses, jackets that all look the same and logos on the back, nastiness, vandalism, beatings, high-rise buildings and arrogant kids, he takes Kassovitz’s La Haine a step further, because those who come from the banlieue no longer need to look like victims but fight back without a real reason. And there, 14 years ago, there is an insane shot that returns in Athena, of racing cars seen from the side, taken with a high-speed drone.
The bodies, the anger and the naivety of 13-18-year-old kids are Gavras’ real passion. In his imagination they are always trained people (often all dressed alike, as if in uniform), with iron wills and desires, an almost military organisation and no limits in what they are willing to do. Perhaps because he was no different from them. Indeed, it takes a lot to found a collective at the age of 13, Kourtrajmé (French slang verlan for court métrage), with a couple of friends and keep it so active until he was 40. Athena was made with other members of Kourtrajmé (Lady Lj at the screenplay) and Les Miserables, a film from two years ago all about banlieue and resistance, was another product of the collective (directed by Lady Lj and produced by Gavras).
With that kind of knowledge, you can also blow the kids up, as in M.I.A.’s controversial music video Born Free, in which the kids respond to the police in riot gear that are harassing defenceless people, unleashing a bloody desert war that spares the viewer nothing, designed and shot to disturb, with its human parts exploding towards the camera. The city is missing, so a piece is missing, and you can feel it. Born Free has great political nastiness but very little style.
The same will be the case in another video for M.I.A., Bad Girls, also filmed far from the metropolis, which plays ironically with the Arab world by placing dusty cars from the 90s on stretches of paved road in the desert, and women posing as men usually do, holding the typical objects of phallic power and exhibiting an ironic pose of domination on cars that move on two wheels. A pure showcase of petty skills, screeching tires and self-display. People who want to take over the world. But what editing and what drone shots! The world of angry suburban kids is so crucial to his visual references that Gavras even manages to slip them into his commercials, such as the one for the Adidas Is All In campaign, in which he places the ardour of his boys alongside major sports figures, or the one for Powerade, in which the grit of a boxer is shown to be rooted in a childhood of suburbia and beatings.
His mother a film producer and his father an idol of the angry cinema of the 70s and 80s (Costa Gavras, short for Kostantinos Gavras), Romain Gavras grew up in a family with all the right references, where fighting was a topic of discussion at the dinner table. Translating it into a clear and complete aesthetic key was therefore an achievement, that came with No Church In The Wild. It is 2012 and that video for the Jay-Z and Kanye West track with Frank Ocean is the dress rehearsal for Athena. An almost five-minute-long clash between the police and angry kids, edited by choosing the essential parts and set no longer in the desert but finally in the streets. Parisian-like city centre architecture, clean streets to be smeared with tear gas, expensive cars to overturn, high class shop windows being smashed while behind them the mounted police charge as in a medieval fight. After the experiment of Stress, the real Kombat Banlieue was born here, that idea for which the movements of protest and struggle, the clothing choices of the rebels, are all about style, that it is the crucial aesthetic of our time and that style is a form of power. His rebels are not desperate because they don’t look like it and their cheap clothing becomes a uniform.
Meanwhile his feature debut, Our Day Will Come, was already out, the crazy story of an absurd rebellion. A teenager and an adult, both with red hair, rebel against a world that marginalises them for it. It makes no sense (and is not memorable), but it is no coincidence that it comes on when the fighting madness takes over and someone sets a car on fire. It does not get much better with The World Is Yours, the second, somewhat more accomplished film, a gangster comedy that is neither really funny nor is it a real crime film. There, however, there is a shot of the kind few can boast of, the first, in which a group of men stand motionless in a suburban setting, tense, holding a hammer to smash something and waiting for an overground train to pass by so they can do so without being heard. Streetwear, desolation, Maghrebi faces, nastiness and a surge of sound for the wagon’s arrival that corresponds exactly with the start of the furious action: an assault to free a dog (!).
This is the path that leads to Gosh, his most accomplished work before Athena, an electronic musical within the fakest of cities and the most popular and aggressive of the world’s suburbs at the same time. Masses with identical clothes but also identical made-up faces and a crazy way of fitting people into architecture. There are at least a couple of perfect sequences (which not surprisingly involve a drone), the one that move backwards from the face of the video’s protagonist, until he becomes a white dot in a forest of high-rise windows, and then the other, one that alone defines an entire career, in which a group of people move drawing a spiral to perfection and the movement of the drone shows us they are inside the Eiffel Tower (or rather its replica). The people assault the most important locations of cities and make them their own through movement, occupying them with the grace of coordinated dance and the style of clothing but with a manner that is always aggressive.
In Gosh, Kombat Banlieue has no Molotov cocktails and clashes but choreography as a means of appropriating space; in Athena, on the other hand, buildings become towers, bridges become the walls of a medieval city, the various levels of the green areas are caves and escape routes. In a brutal regression, the periphery becomes a pre-civilisation space, a stronghold for defence and counter-attack. When at the end of the first furious 10-minute sequence shot, in which the rebels storm a police barracks, steal their weapons and return to the neighbourhood to barricade themselves in, the drone shoots them with a backward movement that widens the perspective and frames them as feudal lords guarding their empire (and the title ATHENA appears), it is clear that Romain Gavras has understood, and knows how to display without words, the purest essence of audiovisuals: to compress a political concept into a style-based visual allegory.
