A new film about an early Polish rap crew is a hit in its home country, but misses its chance to make a real statement about the importance of post-communist hip-hop
The trenchant clatter of breakbeats was one way you could tell Poland had rejoined the slipstream of global culture in the 1990s. That was when the country first got its own hip-hop scene – not the most likely thing under the previous communist regime. Adopting another favourite byproduct of western culture, nostalgia, the Polish are being currently fired up in cinemas by Jesteś Bogiem (You Are God), a biopic of Paktofonika, one of the key early bloc-rocking rap crews.
The film, directed by documentarian Lestes Dawid, pulled in 370,000 people on its first weekend in mid-September – the third-biggest opening for a Polish film in the last 20 years. It has not quite overtaken Agnieszka Holland's Oscar-nominated Holocaust drama In Darkness as the top-grossing local film of 2012. But its explosive start suggests that it's nailed the 18-35 demographic most likely to be still in sync with Paktofonika's confrontational style.
Marcin Kowalcyck is impressive – packing some of the surly vitality of a young Vincent Cassel – as Magik, the mentally volatile creative force at the heart of the group. Dawid Ogrodnik and Tomasz Schuhardt play Paktofonika's other members Rahim and Fokus, and the three actors are the film's strong suit. And Jesteś Bogiem, superficially at least, knows its youth-flick moves: by centering its account of the group in the mercurial Magik, his failing relationship and his suicide in 2000, it clings closely to the model of Anton Corbijn's Control. With the Katowice housing estates cloaked in monochrome ghetto chiaroscuro by Dawid, the film keeps its visual hip-hop signifiers tight, too.
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But it's still a missed opportunity. "The filmmakers' intentions are unarguably honorable: to do justice to a remarkable creative figure and to commemorate his memory," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young. "But the heavy burden of responsibility seems to have become a crushing weight on Dawid."
Jesteś Bogiem's script stutters throughout its two-hour runtime, and never properly explains why Paktofonika's brand of subversion was so liberating for turn-of-the-millennium Poland. You get the sense they were at odds with the Catholic mainstream: when Magik unveils Jestem Bogiem (I Am God), the blaspheming song from which the film borrows a title, his fellow group members complain he has gone "too far". But that's as clear as it gets. If the aim was to be the Polish 8 Mile, then it also fails to burrow deeply enough beneath Magik's petulance, and find some grandeur to give him an Eminem-like status. It's the scenes where he's borrowing money from his manager to buy nappies, not his dynamite MCing, that register.
Shame, because where Poland tapped into hip-hop's unstoppable 90s planet-wide progress, here was a chance to make a contribution in return. A hip-hop film from a former communist country could have added edgy notes to the accepted youth-culture movie blueprint: a hunger for post-communist self-expression more urgent than the standard rebel ethic, and a scepticism about the marketing and exploitation of "lifestyle choices". But, doggedly concentrating on an account that is for Paktofonika insiders only, rather than laying open the subject matter for an audience outside Poland, Jesteś Bogiem doesn't have that kind of awareness.
Apparently, though, those sort of radical intentions were what the film originally had in mind. Its publicity talks it up as an indictment of new-era capitalism and compares it to Andrzej Wajda's 1976 classic Man of Marble as a critique of a generation. Some PR person mastered the hallowed hip-hop tradition of self-aggrandisement there. An opportunity to put Poland on the global map of cine-cool, to enhance the arthouse pedigree won for it over the years by Wajda and others, has gone begging.
• Jesteś Bogiem is in selected UK cinemas now. Fokus and Rahim play the Garage, London (0843 221 0100) on 14 October.
• Next week's After Hollywood is about North American magical realism. Meanwhile, what global box-office stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.
