“Nobody here is going to talk to you,” warns a young man who walks quickly with a friend across the square of Parc aux lièvres, a social housing complex in Évry, 35 kilometers south of Paris.
It is as if he were saying: “Move on, there is nothing to see”.
But there is much to see.
A veiled woman leaves the pharmacy, the only store that is still open.
A group of young people spend the afternoon at the foot of the walls full of graffiti and observe the visitors.
A mother passes with a cart.
This is a landscape of abandoned shops and lowered shutters.
Of buildings where the elevator breaks down every week.
Where parents advise their children not to go down to the square to avoid getting into trouble.
It is an almost deserted landscape: soon a good part of the buildings will be demolished to build new houses.
Most of the neighbors have left.
The neighborhood of « parc au lievres « in Vitry sur Seine near Paris, where the Netflix film « Athena » was filmed.eric hadj (eric Hadj)
"Even if the neighborhood is destroyed, it will remain in our memories," reads a mural.
In a doorway you can see a graffiti against Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right, and another that says: “They haven't put the handcuffs on me yet, so tomorrow I'll start again”.
On a wall someone has written “Athena”.
The Parc aux lièvres is the landscape of the most recent civil war fantasy in France: the feature film
Athena
, directed by Romain Gavras and released in September on the Netflix platform.
This is where this story of the death of a boy, supposedly at the hands of the police, and what happens after, was shot in the summer of 2021.
The episode lights up the neighborhood –Athena in fiction, Parc aux lièvres in reality– and the country.
The
banlieue
– the multicultural and impoverished outskirts – is both a real and an imaginary territory.
As the
western
did with the North American West, cinema has turned the
banlieue
into a mythological territory, a mirror of the deep fears of a society.
Athena
is an action movie that leaves the viewer breathless from the first minute.
A technical
tour de force
, a Greek tragedy, a peplum with hundreds of extras and epic-sounding music and choirs.
It is also a war film that imagines how it could light the fuse of civil war in a context of suburban insurrection against the police and with a background of ultra violence.
Deputy Farida Amrani visiting a family in the Parc aux lièvres neighborhood. eric hadj (eric Hadj)
"I realized, and for years, that the increasingly abysmal distance between the population and those who spoke on their behalf, politicians and journalists, must necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable," said the narrator of
Submission
, the novel by one of the prophets of French malaise, Michel Houellebecq.
"France, like the other countries of Western Europe, had been heading for a long time towards a civil war, it was an evidence."
The idea that France is a pressure cooker about to explode has come back and forth for years.
It is a perception fueled by the outbreak of the
banlieue
in 2005, the jihadist attacks of 2015 or the revolt of the yellow vests in 2018.
In the spring of 2021, dozens of military and ex-military personnel with coup plotters published an anonymous forum warning about the civil conflict and offering to intervene.
A few weeks later, the polemicist Éric Zemmour entered the campaign for the 2022 presidential elections, with a similar speech: “A war of civilizations is being waged on our soil.
If we continue, we are going to civil war.”
The essayist Guillaume Barrera, author of
La Guerre civile.
History, Philosophie.
Politique
, explains: “The phrase
civil war
has entered customs and even more so in speeches.
Although it can contribute to alerting us to the seriousness of the social or national situation, above all it favors confusion, anger, hatred and fear.
Under this term, very different phenomena are included, which correspond more to riots, revolt in the neighborhoods, settling scores between criminals or attacks.
It is an instrument of political discourse that should be distrusted, a scarecrow and a mixed bag, more than a precise concept: the proper meaning of the word is lost”.
There are novels that echo this anguish –or fascination– such as some by Houellebecq or
Les événements
by Jean Rolin.
And above all, films that, seen chronologically, tell the evolution of this neurosis.
In Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 precursor
Hate
, the background was petty crime, police violence and neighborhood riots.
In the most recent
Les Miserables
by Ladj Ly and
BAC Nord
by Cédric Jimenez, the riots increasingly resemble war scenes.
Atenea
is the culmination: the kids, a true organized militia, entrench themselves with firearms while the television channels hammer out a message: “Civil war in France”.
“It's not realistic”, says Farida Amrani, deputy for Évry
, in the square where some of the most violent scenes of
Athena were filmed. “What I regret is that our young people appear like animals.
This is not true neighborhood life.
It is not our life, nor that of the young people here.
We fight to give another image of our city and this film, which will be seen all over the world, destroys it.
How are they going to see us?”
The neighborhood looks like a fortress, like in the movie.
The blocks rise around a raised plaza, accessible only by narrow stairs.
Below it passes a tunnel and a three-lane avenue.
The district of Parc aux Liévres near Paris.Eric Hadj (Eric Hadj)
Amrani, from the left-wing party La Francia Insumisa, fears that Athena
will be instrumentalized
.
“The
fachosphere
[far-right social media activists] have appropriated the film and say: 'This is reality!
This is youth!
Blacks and Arabs!
When we tell them that they are terrorists, that they are violent... Well, this is it!'”, she denounces.
"But our neighborhood is
not
this," she insists.
That war, as it appears in
Athena
, is hyperbole, pure fantasy, does not mean that fantasy does not reflect real anguish.
“On the one hand, the declassification of a part of the population has engendered a very lively resentment towards the
winners of globalization
and the
technocrats
who govern us, accompanied, in this same part, by a real fear of demographic substitution”, he explains. Barrier.
“On the other, international jihadism, from Al Qaeda to Daesh [Islamic State], has done everything to provoke civil war, without quotes, in Europe and particularly in France.
It has not succeeded, but it has planted the seeds of discord that still burn.
The essayist and philosopher warns against the "self-fulfilling prophecy."
That, from so much talk lightly of civil war, one day something will happen.
"Let's stick to the meaning of the words," he asks.
In France there is not remotely widespread political violence, nor has public debate broken down, nor is polarization extreme, nor are there armed factions seizing power.
In Évry, in the square where
Atenea
was filmed , the deputy Amrani meets some neighbors.
He, of Algerian origin;
she Moroccan.
They invite her to go up to her flat, one of the ones still inhabited before her demolition.
In the living room, around a small table with tea and cupcakes, are her young children, the girl of 14, the boy of 16. The boy, Noureddine, has friends who acted as extras in the film.
"I thought it was super," he says.
His reading of
Athena
: "They are people tired of being repressed, tired of feeling abandoned."
The mother, Djamila, has not seen her, but has heard about her and the scenes of blood and fire in the square below her building, and this smiling, hospitable woman says: "France is not like that."
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