This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Austin Polish Film Festival. PROCEDER streams for free from Dec. 6-13 — click here to watch the film and check out the rest of the lineup!

Trailer

Well fuck me! Here’s your writer’s reminder to always do a bit of research before diving into something you’re going to be covering. Even if you’re thinking to yourself “hey! I’m going in blind as blind, that’s my angle.” I am finding out now, as of typing these words, that the car thief turned Polish rap superstar Tomasz Chada, protagonist of the film Proceder, was a real dude! Damn. Completely changes the game. As an 8 Mile for the Eastern European set (you know, the way it was playing in my head as I watched) this movie turned up short, but as a retro-fitted (in my mind) biopic it is BANANAS. Chada was one mean motherfucker, and this film takes us on that journey.

The way this movie unspools resembles a maelstrom of genre films that are thrown like horseshoes at a COVID-flaunting drunken frat party, and it would be utter chaos except we’re blessed with the wonderful Piotr Witkowski (Chada) as the immovable stake around which those ‘shoes can rattle. His emotive wide set eyes under a clean-shaven dome lend his face an implacable unknowability that can whip from deep tenderness to frothy jocular violence at a moment’s notice. This central figure has film after film wrapped around him: drug movie, car heist movie, dirty cop movie, bad boy family drama movie, prison movie, meteoric music biz rise movie… our only grounding element is the drive and fuck-the-world calm of Chada. For the most part, it’s enough.

In fact, there are moments in the film where the game pieces seem to be moved around by destiny. “Coke isn’t my thing,” he tells a pal early on in a Chekhov’s Cocaine confession. We find out quite shortly that boy is it. Throughout, his actions are either so outrageous or so neglectful, their consequences so dire, that forward motion seems almost a fantastical option. I’m often reminded of this take on Dirk Diggler in Boogie Night; the scammin’ crew is sitting on the couch at Rahad’s house, trying to pass off a humongous amount of baking soda as cocaine. The camera spends more than half a minute placidly viewing Dirk’s seemingly vacant gaze and its unknowable interiority, and yet the world spins. Here, Chada sometimes seems guided by some unknowable yet benevolent force, and at others, I can’t help but agree with his music producer who screams at him: “Start using your fucking brain!”

A strange (but honestly refreshing once I found out this was a biopic, smh @ me) element of this purported “music film” is the complete eschewing of a typical rise-to-fame in-movie throughline. I’m generally a fairly observant movie-goer, especially when I’m taking notes for a review, and the first time I got an inkling that this rapping so-and-so was famous is maybe halfway through the movie: Chada goes to prison and his producer comes to visit talking about sold-out shows and record deals. Prior to this moment, we’ve only seen Chada at what seemed to be an open mic, out rapping with his friends in a parking garage, and music-writing-montaging with push-ups and crumpled sheets of paper and soulful window sitting. Now his fellow inmates are asking for his signature? It’s clear that this film does not set celebrity as its north star, the way many American music films end up doing.

Some strange beats in this film smack of the now-familiar flavor in the Streaming Era: was the film initially intended to be a mini-series, or is it maybe angling for a mini-series adaptation in the future? One in particular involves the introduction of a prison ping-pong tourney mini-plot, an instant black-market commissary ramp up, and a trip to a theater we never see the inside of. This whole side plot takes up maybe 5 minutes of screen time. Maybe it’s inevitable that there will be moments like this in a biopic attempting to faithfully recreate the timeline of a figure’s life, but the film tends to sag when it distracts Chada from his core drives.

We’ll let Chada the man close us out with some lines that, at first, I thought were a bit on the nose, but as I keep revisiting them, what can I say but “where’s the lie?”

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Stray thoughts

The script peppers broad potshots at capitalism throughout the film, one such exchange between hospital-bound folks leading to my favorite line in the film: “Communism fell apart and what? Chicken butt!”
It was strange from an American perspective to see this film about hip-hop and not have a single Black actor on screen, especially when Chada references several American rappers as influences. I checked the demographics though and Poland is ~97% ethnic Polish, so maybe that’s accurate? Hard to say.

Austin Polish Film Festival 2020: PROCEDER