With a washed-out bleakness that seems as if it’s in black and white, although this is actually a color picture.
The recently concluded AFI Film Festival, which is L.A.’s biggest and best filmfest, screened 160-plus features and documentaries. Two Prosecutors, which was nominated for Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, is – along with Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ Seymour Hersh doc Cover-Up – among the best pictures shown this year at AFI Fest. Director/co-writer Sergey Loznitsa directs both fiction and nonfiction films, but although it looks like and has the feel of a documentary, with a washed-out bleakness that seems as if it’s in black and white, although this is actually a color picture, Two Prosecutors is indeed a scripted movie with actors, starring Aleksandr Kuznetsov as the lead character, Alexander Kornyev.
Along with Costa-Gavras’ superb 1970 Czech-set The Confession starring Yves Montand, Two Prosecutors is one of the best fiction movie critiques ever shot that’s explicitly about Stalinism. (I am not including here movies that metaphorically, implicitly criticize Stalinism, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s 1946 Ivan the Terrible, Part II – which was banned once Stalin realized he was supposed to be Ivan – or screen adaptations of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.)
The absolutely heartbreaking, super realistic Two Prosecutors is directed by Sergey Loznitsa, who was born in the Soviet Union in 1964. It opens with the title “1937 USSR The Height of Stalin’s Terror” at a prison in Bryansk, which is roughly 300 miles southwest of Moscow. Almost miraculously, a plea from a political prisoner in the prison’s “Special Block” finds its torturous way to newly minted state prosecutor, Alexander Kornyev (Kuznetsov). Fresh out of law school, the young lawyer and Party member is imbued with the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he doggedly insists on visiting the old inmate. Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a former Bolshevik who alleges high level NKVD (the USSR’s secret police from 1934-1946) corruption, wherein Lenin’s central committee and other loyal Communists are being executed and/or imprisoned. The old Bolshie plaintively questions whether or not Kornyev is “a real Bolshevik.”
The naive Kornyev heads to Moscow with the intent of informing and warning the Prosecutor General, Andrey Vyshinsky (an actual historical figure played by Anatoliy Beliy), about the political prisoner’s accusations. What happens when he informs the high-ranking Soviet official about the allegations re: the secret police? I don’t want to divulge any plot spoilers, so let’s just say that it reminded me of an urban legend about Stalin: He would wine and dine citizens at the Kremlin to allay their suspicions the night before they were to be arrested and likely executed.
Two Prosecutors includes gallows humor the politically astute will likely understand: The prison deputy governor jokes with a guard that during the purge trials, Karl Radek, who became a member of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, was asked: “What did you do before the Revolution?” Lenin’s comrade replied: “I waited in jail for the Revolution.” Then, asked what he did after the Revolution, Radek replied: “I waited for jail.”
A great chronicler of the Soviet Union and Russia, Loznitsa’s many other films include the documentaries State Funeral (2019), about Stalin’s death, and 2021’s Babi Yar. Context, about the mass slaughter of Kiev Jews by the Nazis. In 2018 Loznitsa lensed the documentary Donbass about the conflict in Ukraine.
In the U.S., Two Prosecutors appears to be making the rounds of the film festival circuit. According to IMDB.com, Two Prosecutors is being screened this month at the Denver FilmFest. When the opportunity presents itself, make sure you become a captive audience of this harrowing, bone-chilling exposé of Stalinism.
