Alexander Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) graduated from law school just three months ago. He landed a job as a supervising prosecutor in the medium-size city of Bryansk, not far from Moscow. His task is to uphold citizen complaints, and to make sure that government institutions abide by the law. Not a trivial duty in the Soviet Union of 1937, when Stalin’s regime was at its oppressive height and any sort of perceived meddling was harshly punished. The infamous dictator killed tens of millions of his own people because they refused to play by the capricious rules that he invented, in what is now known as the Great Purge.
Kornyev receives a letter literally written in blood from an inmate and decides to investigate. He attends the local prison, where about 10,000 men are being held. He insists upon seeing Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), who is being held in solitary confinement. The prison manager hesitates, claiming that the prisoner has a contagious disease. The undaunted prosecutors insists, and he is finally led to a small cell. The security is such that one would expect to find Hannibal Lector, excepts that Kornyek finds a frail old man instead.
Stepniak reveals his body covered with torture bruises, and it soon surfaces that the two men had crossed paths earlier. Most significantly, Kornyev and Stepniak hold a steadfast commitment to justice. Stepniak was once a prosecutor who refused to bestow the capital punishment upon innocent men, and he is now being punished for his “counter-revolutionary” behaviour (the irony of the adjective begets no explanation). They immediately bond in their complicity: they are lone fighters in the struggle against an intrinsically corrupt regime. There is little doubt that their idealism is noble, however is it practical? Wouldn’t it have been easier if they just quietly played the same.
Our young and sanguine protagonist is determined to reach the elusive Soviet Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy). He is guided by the somewhat naive belief that the crimes of torture will be investigated, and that justice will prevail. He encounters some characters of very questionable intentions on his journey, including a lawyer around his age who insists that they know each other. The telltale signs are all there: something in rotten in the Soviet state. Kornyev confronts single-handedly three of French Marxist Louis Althusser’s repressive state apparatuses: the police (Stalin’s infamous NKVD), the prison system and the judiciary. He is doomed to fail, it seems.
Impeccably shot, with an unusually square frame ratio, an entirely static camera, meticulous lighting, and cold hues creating a palpable sense of confinement, Two Prosecutors is an accomplished piece of filmmaking, based on the eponymous novella by Georgy Demidov. The performances too are pitch-perfect. Loznitsa’s latest creation offers viewers some compelling commentary on the futility of determination, and its problematic relationship with authoritarianism.
On the negative side, Two Prosecutors overstays its welcome with a duration of nearly two hours, occasionally lapsing into monotony. It lacks the panache, the sense of self-deprecation and self-irony of some of the Ukrainian filmmakers’s previous fiction pieces, such as A Gentle Creature (2017) and Donbass (2019). Instead, it rests firmly on more stern and laborious examination of idealism. Plus: the ending is fairly predictable.
This European co-production of six countries was filmed mostly in Riga, Latvia’s capital). Given current geopolitical tensions, it would be unconceivable that the Russia would join forces with its Western neighbours, or even to allow shooting to take place on Russian soil. Both leads – Kuznetsov and Filippenko – are critics of the invasion of Ukraine, and therefore nemeses of the Kremlin and Russian cinema (which is almost entirely reliant on public funding).
Two Prosecutors premiered in the Official Competition of the 78th Festival de Cannes, when this piece was originally written. It was released on the same day as its informal companion piece, Dominik Moll’s Case 137. This equally effective film also reveals the repercussions of investigating and confronting Althusser’s state apparatuses in France, following police brutality during the Yellow Vest protests of 2018.
Also showing in the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, the 69th BFI London Film Festival, and the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
