Two Prosecutors

The lead-up is distinctively Kafkaesque. New to the position and younger than his predecessor, Alexander Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) has just arrived at a Soviet prison to meet with an elderly man being held for “counter-revolutionary crimes.” The process is slow-walked as much as possible, with Kornyev made to wait several hours while a midlevel official tells him how busy the warden is; once he’s granted an audience with the prison chief, Kornyev is told that the inmate in question is in a special block reserved for prisoners who may or may not have infectious diseases.

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None of this is true, of course. Even without the title card reminding us that 1937 represented the height of Stalin’s reign of terror, it would be immediately clear that our protagonist faces an uphill battle if he actually wants to help his prospective client. Kornyev is one of those tragic characters who doesn’t know what kind of story he’s in, rushing headlong into the action with an ill-advised mix of idealism and naivete; you may even question if he knows what country he’s in. To say that 1930s Russia was neither the time nor place to be a high-minded attorney would be putting it mildly, yet Kornyev compels us for the exact reason he has us bracing for what might befall him.

It isn’t just that none of his fellow government officials and party members are inclined to help him; it’s that they genuinely can’t believe he wants to be helpful in the first place. They’re so inured to the systemic corruption of which they’re all a part that the concept of justice doesn’t seem to have occurred to them in a long time. Working within the confines of a totalitarian regime might not be especially effective, but if the only other option is becoming like these men, it’s impossible not to root for — and worry about — Kornyev as he endeavors to do the right thing.

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Based on a 1969 novella by Georgy Demidov, a physicist who spent 14 years in a gulag as a political prisoner, Two Prosecutors consists of little more than a series of real-time conversations, most of them between 15 and 20 minutes long — and yet listening in feels like watching a slow-burning fuse. You know there’s little chance of a favorable outcome but hope against hope that someone, somewhere, will share Kornyev’s sense of duty. Lenin is dead and Stalin is far too busy to be dealing with low-level bureaucratic matters of this sort, but both men cast a shadow over the entire film — sometimes literally, what with all the busts of them adorning official government offices.

It’s impossible not to root for — and worry about — Kornyev as he endeavors to do the right thing.

The best, most haunting conversation is saved for the end, when our hero finds himself in a train carriage with two friendly men who share their dinner with him and ask about his work before pulling out a guitar and singing a song. Kornyev has had a productive meeting with the chief prosecutor about addressing his client’s claims of mistreatment and is headed home feeling hopeful for the first time, which is why the scene is so intense — you can feel the movie approach the end just as quickly as the train is accelerating toward its final destination. Kornyev’s expression betrays little throughout most of Two Prosecutors, but here he can’t help cracking half a smile as his fellow travelers sing the words “the country rises in glory to meet the new day.”

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Loznitsa, one of Ukraine’s foremost filmmakers, has made a career of both documenting and fictionalizing just this kind of historical unrest. He’s made several movies set before, during, and just after World War II, few of which are this straightforwardly compelling. In this movie’s world, as in our own, it’s rarely the prosecutors you have to worry about — it’s the persecutors, of whom there seem to be more than ever. The line between the two is increasingly blurred, yet Kornyev is always on the right side of it. If only the same could be said of his comrades.