Directed by: Sergei Losznitsa
Distributed by: Janus Films
Written by Taylor Baker
80/100
In “Two Prosecutors,” Sergei Losznitsa captures the inhumanity of the structures—physical and social—under Stalin’s communist reign. Taking place about half a decade after the Holodomor, during the height of The Great Purge, our hero Kornyev, a freshly graduated prosecutor, shows up at a prison after a prisoner’s complaint written in blood made its circuitous way to his office. On his arrival, he is indirectly rebuked by the prison’s leadership and made to wait hours before the structure’s social and physical barriers eventually relent to his persistence. He worms his way through barren landscape and dull interiors until he enters an unremarkable cell holding Stepniak, an old Bolshevik who had penned the blood-written letter. At Stepniak’s insistence, the guards are forced from his cell, and he’s left alone with Kornyev while the guards look on through “Judas holes.” Stepniak lifts his shirt and shows the young prosecutor the torture he’s endured. This sets Kornyev off on a journey to Moscow to meet Andrey Vyshinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor, who would later serve as Soviet overseer of the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.
Adapted from Georgy Demidov’s novel ‘Zwei Staatsanwälte,’ “Two Prosecutors” unfolds in a series of movements in which the structure resists the prodding of our naive hero, eventually seeming to relent. Vyshinsky is played expertly by Anatoliy Belyy, his knowing gaze seeming to look through Kornyev as the young man pleads for help so he isn’t sent to prison when he returns to Bryansk. Vyshinsky gives Kornyev three gifts: the first is the unscheduled meeting, the second a writ of acknowledgement so that when he returns to Bryansk, he’ll have a piece of paper to submit to his local chief prosecutor that will operate as protection—he has the signature of Stalin’s chief prosecutor after all. The third is a train ticket so Kornyev can travel back to Bryansk for free, with a bed, rather than in the cramped public car.
What follows is a heartbreaking sequence that reasserts the callousness of the communist state and the compromised nature of its collective. Aleksandr Kuznetsov is incredible in his role as Kornyev; there isn’t a moment when he seems anything but the naive young prosecutor. The defunct prison of Riga—repurposed for the film’s setting—becomes an unrelenting backdrop. Losznitsa, a director who primarily films documentaries, lets his cameras roll for extended sequences, allowing the spaces to come to life and the characters time to inhabit them. It is when Kornyev acts with kindness or humanity that the entire social and physical structure seems to react like an immune system looking to put down a foreign body. Nearly 90 years after the events that inspired Georgy Demidov to write his long-unpublished novel, both it and this adaptation seem as prescient as ever.
“Two Prosecutors” Clip
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