A bright-eyed prosecutor fresh out of law school gets a first-hand taste of just how insidious the Great Purge and political repression under Joseph Stalin were in 1937 Russia in Two Prosecutors, which played this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival after premiering in competition at Cannes. This stark parable from Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa (Donbass, Maidan) about the bureaucracy of terror, and the terror of bureaucracy, feels distressingly relevant to the state of contemporary politics—and deserves as large an audience as its deliberate storytelling will allow.
Shot in a striking 4:3 aspect ratio by cinematographer Oleg Mutu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Two Prosecutors opens in a decrepit prison in 1937 Bryansk, which houses tens of thousands of victims of political persecution, awaiting their deaths from torture, disease, or malnutrition. Loznitsa based his screenplay on the work of writer Georgy Demidov, who himself spent 14 years in Soviet prison camps so deadly he termed them “Auschwitz without ovens.”
Despite the wretched setting, every frame of the film is so gorgeously composed it looks like a work of art. Unlike a Son of Saul, which invites the audience to experience its horrors first-hand, the presentation of Two Prosecutors positions the viewer as an outsider, acutely aware of everything that is going on, but utterly powerless to offer any kind of assistance.
In the Bryansk camp, an elderly man is given a sack overflowing with thousands of individual letters like the ones addressed to Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. Under the threat of his own death, he is ordered to burn them all in a tiny furnace, which he is given a single match to light. He painstakingly begins his task by burning the letters one-by-one, reading their desperate contents aloud before tossing them to the fire—but one letter, scrawled in blood on a piece of cardboard—captures his attention.
Miraculously, this one letter is smuggled out of the prison, and makes its way to the hands of Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), the newly-appointed public prosecutor of the region. The letter comes from Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a lawyer who is alluded to be Kornyev’s predecessor. He warns that the secret police (NKVD) in Bryansk are using the prison to systematically murder an entire generation of communist party members who may not be blindly loyal to the new regime.
Kornyev, who personally recalls Stepniak speaking at his graduation, is alarmed by the letter and makes a personal visit to the prison to meet with the prisoner. In what will be a recurring theme in the film, the bureaucrats in charge—here represented by the prison governor (Vytautas Kaniusonis) and others—do everything in their power to prevent the prosecutor from completing the task that they themselves acknowledge he, of course, has every right to complete.
The public prosecutor is made to wait for hours just to meet with the governor, in hopes that he will lose interest and show himself away. He is told that Stepniak has a horrible contagious disease, in the hopes that he will get scared and turn back. But Kornyev, like his predecessor, is an idealist whose loyalty lies with the party, not the authorities currently in charge. And so, as the audience is all too aware, he is entirely complicit in the course of his own fate, despite being given every opportunity to fall in line and free himself from it.
Of course, the powers that be do not want subjects loyal to a party, or an idea, or even a state—they need useful idiots blindly loyal to their rule, and nothing else. Kornyev takes his case as high as he can only to discover the corruption goes all the way to the top, and we watch him slowly die inside as he comes to terms with what we already know. Kuznetsov is phenomenal as the young idealist who is slowly eaten away from both outside and within; his largely stoic expression revealing a surprising amount of complexity.
In one of Two Prosecutors‘ most evocative moments, Kornyev assists a young woman who drops some papers on a staircase while dozens of others rush by without thinking to help. In this world, even common courtesy a is foreign concept unless explicitly instructed by the regime; the person you’re aiding may very well be an undesirable, calling your own loyalty into question. The young woman herself doesn’t even offer thanks, wary of Kornyev’s potential intent.
There’s a direct parallel, of course, between the events of Two Prosecutors and what is happening in contemporary Russia, but the themes of the film are universal. Good intentions, strong morals, even common sense are foreign concepts for our bureaucrats—if they aren’t blindly loyal to their superiors, they’re a problem that will taken care of soon enough. A corrupt system cannot be fixed from the inside, no matter how reasonable the cause.
Most of us already know this—we’ve learned it through bitter experience—and so Loznitsa quite brilliantly frames his film as a kind of horror movie; a sense of dread slowly falls over his protagonist as he comes to realize that the killer is in the house. That dread extends to us—we root for these kinds of characters, and in a movie, at least, they can hope to win. But Two Prosecutors, perhaps quite correctly, bleeds us of this kind of hope. It feels less like a historical document and more like a modern warning, and is one of the most important films of the year.
