THE STORY – In 1937, amid Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, a young Soviet prosecutor comes across a letter written by a prisoner in Bryansk. Believing the man to be the victim of NKVD corruption, the prosecutor seeks out justice with the Procurator General.
THE CAST – Aleksandr Filippenko, Aleksandr Kuznetsov & Anatoliy Beliy
THE TEAM – Sergei Loznitsa (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 118 Minutes
A major name in documentary cinema, the Byelorussian-born Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa became a controversial figure in some circles in 2022 when the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled him for expressing his dissent against a proposed boycott of Russian films in the wake of the war between the two countries. The decision was quite baffling, given Loznitsa’s filmography speaks for itself on how he feels about Russia, both past and present: his most recent fiction film at the time, 2018’s “Donbass,” was a darkly humorous look at the occupation of Eastern Ukraine, and his documentaries have frequently looked at the darker underbelly of history, specifically to make sure people don’t forget those events. Such a situation – complete with some detractors accusing him of having no authority to comment on the ongoing war since he resides primarily in Berlin – is perhaps an inciting factor in Loznitsa’s return to fiction filmmaking with “Two Prosecutors,” an adaptation of the novella of the same name by Georgy Demidov, a physicist, and writer who was also a political prisoner during the time depicted in the film. The novella was written in 1969 but not published until 2009, 22 years after the author’s death, a detail that adds to the story feeling quite timely and topical despite being the product of a specific time and place.
The year is 1937, and, as the opening title cards make clear, what we’re about to see takes place during “the height of Stalin’s terror.” In the opening shot, a large metal door opens to lead into a prison complex, an image not too dissimilar from ones seen in other movies on totalitarianism, including Loznitsa’s own documentaries featuring both archive and present-day footage of monuments to abject cruelty. Here, people are locked up on the slimmest of pretenses, condemned to perform absurd or humiliating tasks. Among the prisoners is an elderly man who’s been assigned to burn all the letters written by Communist Party members to Stalin, and as he goes through the pile of repetitive scraps of paper, he reads them, perhaps out of boredom. One such letter catches his eye because it was seemingly written in blood. He keeps it, and the missive eventually makes its way to the desk of young prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), whose ambition and idealism are not necessarily the best qualities to possess in this particular context. Kornyev ascertains the identity of the inmate, one Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a former intellectual who alleges severe mistreatment at the hands of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He then decides to take the case all the way to Moscow, requesting a meeting with his superior, the stone-faced Andrey Vyshynsky (Anatoliy Beliy), who’s far from enthusiastic about listening to these stories, be they Stepniak’s or anyone else’s. And while Kornyev is on a quest for justice, the world he lives in does not share that interest at all.
Reteaming once again with Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu (a frequent collaborator of Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu), Loznitsa sets out to accurately capture the mood and look of the time, and the aesthetic does a lot of the heavy lifting, conveying the almost Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation and context, albeit without the dark humor of some of the director’s previous work. This story is told in a more straightforward manner, with any laughs from viewers more likely to be an attempt at relief in the face of unrelenting bureaucratic bleakness and tension that underscores every elongated dialogue scene.
Central to the project’s appeal is also the interaction between the two leads, the prosecutors of the title. Kornyev is one of the juicier roles recently offered to Aleksandr Kuznetsov, a rising Russian talent who, in addition to starring in domestic hits such as the comedy thriller “Why Don’t You Just Die!”, has also appeared in international productions (he was a German wizard in Harry Potter spin-off “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”). Now back on home turf, so to speak (the film, an international co-production, was shot in Latvia for obvious logistical reasons), he gets to sink his teeth into a part that says a lot without actually speaking much, embodying the quirks of an oppressive system through pained silences and full hearted idealism.
On the flipside, the expressionless face of Vyshynsky belongs to Anatoliy Beliy, a frequent collaborator of Kirill Serebrennikov on stage, who becomes the perfect avatar of an immovable bureaucratic apparatus, explicitly rooted in Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s (when he sought to remove all remnants of influence of his political rival Leon Trotsky), but at the same time reminiscent of countless other governments still behaving in a similar manner close to a century later. When the two finally meet face to face, after many individuals have attempted to thwart Kornyev from pursuing the meeting, the two create a memorable standoff of wills and morals that contain the beliefs held by Russian men during that era (and still today).
Loznitsa’s interest in the literary source material is understandable, given his recurring preoccupation with Russian and Soviet history and their more hidden facets. That said, his fictional work often suffers in comparison to his documentaries, and “Two Prosecutors” is no exception, not least because the more serious approach to the subject, compared to something like “Donbass,” can make the repetitiveness of some scenes feel formulaic in a slightly unappealing way before the closing moments deliver the perfect parting shot after a perhaps too prolonged lead-up. It’s a chilling reminder of how totalitarianism cannot be so easily confronted and defeated with a pure heart when there’s disregard for the law.
