Sundance 2021: Prime Time
In the great tradition of master director Sidney Lumet's empathetic, taught dramas, Jakub Piątek's single-location thriller Prime Time, his feature debut, succeeds largely on the backs of superb performances from its central cast.
It is the story of a young twenty-something college dropout, Sebastian (Bartosz Bielenia, Corpus Christi), who, on New Year's Eve 1999, decides to hold an anchor hostage to bargain a spot to broadcast a speech right after the Presidential New Year's address. The cops are called and continually say the wrong things, family arrives, complicating the situation, and his vying for a spot on air is frustrated by the concerts and speeches pre-recorded and set to air at the same time. As the night drags on, inching closer and closer to the President's speech, barriers break down, exhaustion sets in, and the simultaneous comedy and tragedy of the situation bubbles up to wonderful effect.
There are obvious shades of Lumet's Network here, in which a veteran anchor rails on air about modern social ills by threatening to take his own life on national television. Prime Time however, is also evocative of Lumet's other great triumphs, Dog Day Afternoon, in its exploration of the desire to pathologize transgressive figures and 12 Angry Men, in its tight, stage-like choreography of its action. Piątek uses the limited locations to their full potential, plotting the narrative across every inch of the news station's set. Bulky broadcasting cameras become surveillance as Sebastian drags his two hostages in and out of view of the crew cordoned off upstairs. Props onset are used to barricade the doors and, even if the windowed control booth just above the stage makes some of the characters' choices seem contrived - especially when militarized police arrive to attempt to take control of the situation, Piątek choreographs the story smartly to keep the angles on the action fresh and exciting.
The star of the show here is most certainly Bartosz Bielenia. His performance is steely and frightening at the start, with the vague look of someone with nothing left to lose, and gradually thaws into a compassionate portrait of a kid who has no idea what he is doing, far in over his head. We sense this relaxation through his hostages who thaw as he does, especially the anchor Mira Kryle (Magdalena Popławska). After spending the beginning of the hostage situation trapped in a prop car, shivering with fear, by the last act, hostages and terrorist sit on stage, disheveled, exhausted, passing around a joint. It is a farcical scene in its radical departure from the tone of the first act, but Piątek eases us through the arc of the gradually shifting power dynamics with such grace that it hardly strikes as a jarring moment. The supremely minimal score helps to keep the focus on characters' shifting feelings and editors Ula Klimek-Piątek and Jarosław Kamiński create the sensation of real-time unfolding before us, such that the story never misses a beat on the larger arc toward the story's inevitable conclusion.
That fatalism, the sense that we know this can only ever end one way, is tied into the fabric of the thematic framework. Clips of other channels are interspersed throughout the runtime as we see the world revolving steadily, New Year's at the axis, Sebastian at the periphery. The night passes them by and, on other channels, interviewees anticipating the new millennium wait with bated breath for Y2K, the end of the world, a new era, something, anything. There is the distinct sense that Sebastian could not have picked a worse moment to try to make a statement. His message, whatever he has written on a sweaty, frayed, folded up paper in his pocket couldn't be more insignificant in the face of a new chapter in history. And, in a broader sense, it fits the medium he's chosen. In a matter of years, television will be phased out as the global information medium for the internet, democratizing access to massive, international audiences. His tragedy is two-fold: wrong time in both the micro and macro sense.
In an age when even attempted insurrections are rendered obsolete by a news cycle scrambling to catch up with this week's disaster, there is both a quaintness to the thought that an entire nation could be enraptured by just one event for twelve hours and a resonance to the image of a man fumbling to communicate as the world passes right by him.
