There is something slightly off about Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecutors” right from the beginning.
It starts to become very noticeable, however, in an early scene between two guards at a Soviet prison. It’s 1937, and the guards are laughing about some joke or another, and then launch into a conversation about whether or not they should allow the new prosecutor – the young, freshly graduated Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) – to speak to a political prisoner who has requested his presence.
They quickly decide they won’t – or, at least they’ll make it as difficult as possible. Their plan is to just let Kornyev wait. If he’s still there at the end of the day, they’ll deal with it then. Before one guard leaves the other’s office, they bring back up that joke, and once again start cutting up like two schoolboys. But, as soon as the first guard exits the room, leaving the other alone, he just … stops. His laughter dies out, and he sits there, eyes empty, staring straight ahead. It’s almost like with no one there to impress, with no regime to uphold, he just turns off.
This guard is just one in a series of cogs in a machine in “Two Prosecutors,” a slow burn of a political thriller that doesn’t excite, but doesn’t exactly want to. Loznitsa’s film does not offer great exhilaration, but is rather astute about the banal ways in which bureaucracy feeds oppression. Made up of just a few long, dialogue-heavy scenes, “Two Prosecutors” lets the tension slowly, slowly, rise until the dread of where we end up feels inevitable.
“Two Prosecutors” takes place towards the beginning of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, a time when Stalin and the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, arrested, jailed, and often executed suspected dissidents – often those aligned with the Bolsheviks, or considered old guard. The political prisoner that Kornyev goes to meet is Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), an old Bolshevik himself, and he has an accusation to make.
According to Stepniak, the NKVD have been torturing suspected dissidents and forcing false confessions. In a moment that typifies the lack of sensationalism in “Two Prosecutors,” Stepniak matter of factly shows the young prosecutor his torture wounds – unlike so many, he has refused to falsely confess, and he wants Kornyev to go to Moscow and tell Stalin and the rest of Politburo what’s happening.
Bringing our knowledge of history and Stalin’s role in the Great Purge to the film, this is where our fear starts to rise for our well-meaning protagonist. Other characters often make references to Kornyev’s youth, and that youth brings with it gumption – he doesn’t ever back down from a stonewalling guard, his determination written all over his face – but it also brings naivety. Kornyev gamely stands up to the guards in his way as leaves the prison, but the guards are mere distractions – just cogs in a greater machine. The group that blocks Kornyev as he tries to leave are almost impossible to tell apart, moving in unison, the same scowl on each face.
What follows Kornyev’s departure from the prison is a small, routine look at one man’s attempt to do the right thing, and how that’s so easily hampered by evils so insidiously boring he won’t see them coming. Loznitsa subtly builds tension, deftly creating an atmosphere that feels claustrophobic without ever delving into exaggeration. Whenever Kornyev enters a room, you can feel all the eyes turn toward him even when you don’t actually see that unfold on screen. He runs into a former classmate outside Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union Andrey Vyshinsky’s (Anatoliy Beliy) door, but as enthusiastically as the classmate greets him, Kornyev doesn’t think he actually knows the man. After they’ve said goodbye and Kornyev turns to go into the office, that classmate watches him as he goes. His plastered-on smile throughout their interaction is one of the more unnerving images in the film,
When Kornyev leaves the prosecutor general’s office, he does so with the belief that he’s done all he can, and the Soviet Union is here to help stop the actions of a few bad apples within the NKVD. He doesn’t see the man watching his car drive away from the office building. He doesn’t feel the terror growing in his train car as his bunkmates ask him about “investigations” and “sabotage.”
But we do. Loznitsa captures the simple, everyday horror of living in a surveillance state, the audience picking up Kornyev’s unavoidable demise before he ever does. The film’s final moments, which are just as simple and staid as the rest of the film, are filled with abject terror.
“Two Prosecutors” opens at the Tara Theatre on April 3.
