Sergei Loznitsa’s forensically goal, intellectually nuanced documentaries have a tendency to face in stark distinction to his fictional output; in movies like My Pleasure, Within the Fog and Donbass, the Ukrainian director is inclined to place his playing cards on the desk, normally addressing his signature topic: the abject failure of the Russian state. Two Prosecutors follows in that custom, being a really sluggish and really talky chamber piece that could possibly be essentially the most terrifying comedy that Aki Kaurismäki by no means made, or a Chaplin-esque horror movie concerning the evils of paperwork in a world dominated by morons. This time, Loznitsa doesn’t simply have the Kremlin in his sights; Two Prosecutors is certainly one of his most accessible movies to this point, with relevance to each nation wrestling with authoritarian political events proper now.
Primarily based on a novella by Soviet and political activist Georgy Demidov (1908-1987), Two Prosecutors begins with a display screen credit score noting the yr as 1937 (“The peak of Stalin’s terror”). A jail door opens, and a procession of damaged males file out into the yard. “That is your work gang,” a warden tells his colleague. “What a positive bunch,” is the sarcastic reply. One particularly previous, dishevelled man is singled out for particular duties; his job is to sit down by a range in an empty cell, incinerating an enormous pile of folded papers. It transpires that they’re letters, written to the expensive chief by males being held illegally, having been compelled to admit to imaginary crimes by NKVD, the USSR’s secret service. He won’t ever learn them.
The previous man is warned of dire penalties ought to he give any of the letters a reprieve. However, he tucks one away, a missive written in blood and addressed to the Bryansk Prosecutor’s Workplace. By some means, it will get to its meant vacation spot, and someday after that, the primary of the 2 prosecutors — a latest graduate known as Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) — arrives on the jail asking to see the governor. As a substitute, he will get his deputy, who tries to fob him off with the Russian equal of “he’s in a gathering.” However Kornyev insists, demanding entry to a prisoner named Stepniak.
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The deputy goes to see the governor, who’s lounging in his workplace on a leather-based couch. “Some pupil has turned up,” he says, and the 2 make plans to depart him hanging round within the deputy’s workplace, hoping he’ll simply get bored and go. However Kornyev does not go, so the governor tells him that Stepniak has a contagious illness, reeling off an inventory of horrible illnesses which can be doing the rounds, like typhoid, diphtheria and far, a lot worse. Kornyev is undeterred, so the governor permits his request, albeit with a sinister warning. “Washing your arms with cleaning soap gained’t prevent from sure infections,” he says, an harmless sufficient line simply dripping with barely hid violence.
‘Two Prosecutors’
SBS Worldwide
Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) is in solitary confinement, and divulges to Kornyev what’s happening within the jail. Lifting up his clothes, he reveals weeping crimson welts and purple lesions throughout his physique (“That’s how issues are, laddy… My urine is crimson.”). Stepniak explains that the Soviet secret service, the NKVD, has infiltrated native authorities and are busily putting in a kakistocracy, concentrating on older occasion members and taking them out with particularly harsh punishments. Kornyev, a positive, upstanding Communist, is shocked at this contempt for the legislation of his land, and will get a practice again to the town, the place he calls for an pressing assembly with the Prosecutor Basic.
The tempo is painfully methodical, as Kornyev faces obstruction and obfuscation at each stage, enduring Kafka-esque ranges of crimson tape earlier than the Prosecutor Basic will even comply with see him. What separates this from, say, a Roy Andersson film is the creeping sense of Parallax View-style menace that units in; there’s a way that Kornyev is getting in over his head, by no means fairly studying the room and making enemies which can be every cumulatively extra harmful than the final. The set design is terrific on this regard; statues of Lenin and Stalin watch over airless, wood-paneled rooms bathed in a passive-aggressive Soviet glaze of inexperienced.
In earlier years, this might need appeared like extra of a really native, and, culturally, very particular story, extra of a cautionary story about what would possibly occur to us within the West if our democracies aren’t protected. It was once a case of there however for the grace of God…, however in 2025, life is coming in any respect of us arduous and quick. Two Prosecutors is a bleak warning from historical past, one that can solely appear increasingly prophetic with the passing of time — and that point begins now.
Title: Two Prosecutors
Competition: Cannes (Competitors)
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Screenwriter: Sergei Loznitsa, primarily based on the novella Two Prosecutors by Georgy Demidov
Forged: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy
Gross sales firm: SBS Worldwide
Operating time: 1 hr 53 minutes
