"Prime time" - a review of Jakub Piątek's film. What would Joker do on the Vistula?

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, midnight! When fireworks break out in Warsaw at the beginning of 2000, the TV studio that Sebastian (Bartosz Bielenia) breaks into is a ticking time bomb of emotions. We meet a boy from nowhere, with erratic eyesight, in a peaked cap and a neighborhood outfit, who needs cameras for a private message. Preached before the eyes of millions, but directed mainly to one, we guess, very special person. Sebastian is led to the studio by Grzegorz's bodyguard. Blackmailed? Bribed? We don't know, but we're following these two further.

Sebastian demands airtime, takes hostages in front of the cameras that were about to cover live the millennium audiotele contest. The eternally late presenter of the diva (Magdalena Popławska) in a silver dress with a coquettish, studied smile is about to praise the advantages of a matte-like car when Sebastian puts the barrel to her temple. The studio door closes, but the three stranded in the TV building won't be alone. Sebastian, Grzegorz and Mira stay under the glass eye of the control room, where the police and negotiators switch places with television production and producers.

This is how the director of "Prime Time" Jakub Piątek sets his action space. And co-writer Łukasz Czapski uses this arrangement, building psychological tension between the characters. The television studio becomes an arena of alternating threatening gestures, tears, sympathy, private dramas, changing decisions on both sides of the control room window. And yet, this is not a classic genre film about a terrorist and hostages.

Sebastian threatens to kill Mira and Grzegorz if the cameras are not turned on, but we probably know from some point that there will be no shooting here, and the scene of smoking a blunt together (by the way, the most banal in the whole film) assures us that the hero it's not about bloodshed. Stockholm Syndrome? Yes, but it is born between Sebastian and the viewer. We are hostages of his secret, about which we will not learn anything if the publisher of the program (Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik) does not press "on air". And we get to know this secret in fragments - Sebastian surreptitiously calls a friend, in a conversation with his father, who was brought in by the servants, he stutters, cries and exposes disappointing family relations.

Yes, we're just starting to like and cheer for this boy, and we'd love to turn on those damn cameras ourselves to find out if it's about THIS. About the fact that he loves someone, and probably in the 90s he can't even more than today, he shouldn't ... Or maybe it was about what a real boy from Tomaszów Mazowiecki was about in 2003, who really broke into the TV studio with a gun at Woronicza. Will this coming out be completed in the light of the millennium fireworks or rather a sparking bomb?

Despite the difference of decades, the setting of this situation reminds us of something. TV screens flashing side by side simultaneously broadcast the president's address, confessions of young people from neighborhood benches, social brawls, promises of politicians, New Year's Eve street polls. Channels released in parallel are a mass emission of informational mush, which today, twenty years later, we scroll through social media and news portals. We have several dozen seconds to digest the reports from the world, whose image simultaneously, even on one page, consists of war reports, weather forecast, help for sick dogs and the enlarged bust of stars X or Y.

Is there any place in such a world to stop for a moment, for any kind of sensitivity? To listen to everyman Sebastian? This question has already been asked by many - incl. they were asked in the brilliant "Joker" by Todd Phillips painted lips of the even more brilliant Joaquin Phoenix. In our backyard, we have Bartosz Bielenia, who with his large, dark circles under his eyes can look from under the bull like probably no other Polish actor of the young generation. This is his emploi, which has already been used in "Corpus Christi" (did you know that Bielenia really wanted to become a priest?), but also in an episodic, though demonic role in "Disco Polo". In "Prime Time" she has an equal partner and it is not the hysterical Mira, although the character is well played by Magda Popławska. It is the police negotiator Lena (the great Monika Frajczyk), remaining in the shadow of her colleagues fighting for the palm of greater testosterone effectiveness.

Lena may be soft at times, but she manages to exert the deepest influence on our homegrown terrorist. Sounded too funny for a situation where the bomb is ticking and someone could lose their life? This is how it was supposed to sound, because Jakub Piątek knows the poetics of this type of thriller and introduces a number of funny and even bromance moments. And he is tempted to close the film with a social commentary. Remember - even though the movie Five is available on Netflix, in "Prime time" we are finally in the TVP building...

text: Marta Kowalska