Post-Festival Review: Two Prosecutors (dir. Sergei Loznitsa)
Plot in a nutshell
It’s 1937 in the USSR, the height of. Stalin’s tyrannical rule and the crackdown on dissidents by the NKVD (both the Soviet interior ministry and the secret police). A young, fresh-out-of-law-school prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) receives a note asking for his help, written in blood, from an inmate serving time in solitary confinement. Kornev decides to follow up, not having a clue what he’s really up against.
Sergei Loznitsa, famous for documentaries like Maidan (2014) and Donbas (2018), returns to what I think he does best: fiction. Or, more appropriately, “fiction”. Two Prosecutors is based on a novella by Georgi Demidov, an engineer-turned-author who served 14 years in the Kolyma labor camps after his arrest in 1938. The tale we watch unfold through the young, naive and innocent point-of-view of Prosecutor Kornev, is directly inspired by Demidov’s first hand experience and stories told to him by fellow inmates.
As the premise suggests, this is no barrel of laughs. It’s a bleak, barren, bureaucratic terrain of totalitarianism, painted in monochrome brown and shades of grey, expressed in portraits of anaesthetized faces. Kornev’s Kafkaesque descent ends up being a circular hell, and it’s best tracked by noticing how gradually more tired he looks throughout his quest, on account of spending most of his time waiting to be seen by whoever is in charge.
The people Kornev interacts with along his infernal journey - the prison governor (Vytautas Kaniusonis), his duty assistant (Andris Keiss), the prisoner Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), the Procurator General Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) among others - tell the story of how a State crushes its own from various angles. The casting is as close to perfection as you can possible get on film; Loznitsa really has a rare gift for finding exactly the right faces he needs.
I remember being blown away by Loznitsa’s previous feature film before this one, A Gentle Creature (2017), but I would have to watch it again to determine how it stacks up against Two Prosecutors. Right now, it feels like I haven’t seen a better depiction of the dread, the hopelessness, and the Sisyphean struggle of citizens who are still guided by working moral compasses. Through the sheer power of dialogue and performance, Loznitsa has crafted an incredibly powerful and crushing feeling of being under the boot. After all, who is the second prosecutor from the title?
With hardly a landscape in sight, let alone a horizon, the bleakness can feel dejecting. It’s a quintessentially Russian film in that respect, bringing to mind that old adage about Russian stories: everyone suffers and then they die. But, of course, there is something inexplicably compelling about watching a story full of misery like this - it’s at once a warning and a lament. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”