TWO PROSECUTORS drops into Stalinist Russia in 1937, a time when trials were not about uncovering truth but proving loyalty to the state. The film, directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, is adapted from Georgy Demidor’s novella of the same name snd while it may look like a courtroom drama on paper, it is more like an important reminder that the law is just there for show.
The violence in this forensic study of repression is minimal, yet, the battered and emaciated figures in the frame, and the brooding spaces that they occupy, tells a story of a regime that ate its own.
Kornyev (Aleksandr Kaznetov) is a young prosecutor who is asked to defend Stepnak ( Igor Filippenko) an older revolutionary accused of working against the state. Kornyev believes he can argue justly that his case can matter, but the longer he tries, the more he runs into dead ends. The real force behind the trial is the Procurator General, Vyshinsky(Anatolly Belly), a man who never raises his voice and still controls the room. The film follows Kornyev as he slowly realises the courtroom is really only there to keep up appearances.
Austere from the word go, as a heavy padlock unlocks the gate at a city prison and a group of inmates, already broken, shuffle in. The figures are coughing and haggard. There is a way in but never, we suspect, any way out.
The young lawyer, an honest Bolshevik just three months into his job as a public prosecutor, has received a note scrawled in blood that has been smuggled out of the prison and determines to interview its author, after which he heads to Moscow to plead his case, and that of a multitude of others falsely imprisoned.
Throughout the TWO PROSECUTORS, Kutzetsov plays Kornyev with a slow and steady arc. At first, he looks fresh and speaks like someone who trusts the rules and truly believes in the law. By the end he’s drained, depleted, and beaten down like he knows that he is just going through the motions. The movie is slow but there’s no way around that. It is part of the design.
Kornyev spends the story waiting for permission, for paperwork, for a chance to speak, and that waiting becomes the punishment. We feel the same dread, despair, and the hopelessness he feels, right there with him. You start to feel how it wears out every single person caught up in it. Near the end Kornyeb seems to have stopped fighting for his client. He speaks almost like testing whether anyone is even listening.
The tonal precision and elegance of the film’s austere aesthetic are beautiful, balanced true to the 1930s. TWO PROSECUTORS is shot in monochrome with barely a hint of colour. The boxy frame, almost square, that featured at the time, fits perfectly with the story of incarceration.
This austere journey deep into the core of a ruthless bureaucracy that is concerned with nothing but maintaining its grip on power is so Orson Wellesish.
