Cannes 2025: two prosecutors, relentless tale on Stalinist purges
In a mixture of deaf anxiety, irony and Kafkai nightmare, Sergei Loznitsa recounts the discovery of the Soviet totalitarian machine from the 1930s by a young idealist prosecutor.
Back to fiction for Sergei Loznitsa, seven years after Donbass and half a dozen documentaries. The Ukrainian filmmaker portrayed in Two prosecutors (in competition) The tragic and absurd odyssey of a young prosecutor of a Russian city, British, southwest of Moscow. Epris of justice, this idealistic Bolshevik will gradually become aware of the reality of Stalinist purges – in 1937, at the top of Soviet terror and the repression orchestrated by the NKVD political police. Square format, fixed plans, “extinct” colors, the film tells a trip to the idle, where the protagonist, Kornev (Alexandre Kouznetsov, and his extraordinary face mixing candor and determination) gradually sinks into the bowels of the totalitarian machine. Two prosecutors is adapted from a short story by Georgy Demidov, a scientist arrested in Kharkiv in 1938, who spent fourteen years at the gulag, then written in 1969 this text which was ultimately published until 2009.
The young prosecutor Kornev strikes the door of the British prison to meet a prisoner, a former Bolshevik now considered as a unwanted politics, which ishes in a building reserved for sick detainees, and who miraculously managed to send to the prosecutor’s office a message of distress, written in blood letters. Kornev intends to accomplish his duty, and defend this man who informs him that the Bolshevik revolution was misguided by the men of the NKDV, and that information must be brought as quickly as possible to the Attorney General (the second prosecutor of the film’s title), in Moscow. To accomplish this mission, his duty, Kornev will go through an exhausting succession and soon a nightmare of prison doors to unlock, from civil servants to convince, waiting rooms where he is peer for hours, brinquebalant night train trips, listen to others left on behalf of the USSR tell their own absurd Odyssey.
Kornev will end up gradually understanding that the world he walks is no longer the one he thought of knowing, that the truth of Bolshevism has already been redefined by men in power, those who decide who holds the truth, who is right and who is wrong. The simplicity, the evidence, the frontality of the observation that Loznitsa draws here can surprise, coming from someone who has accustomed us to formal or theoretical devices much more complex, but this Kafkai journey is constelled with perhaps unforgettable scenes-one of which, in the train of the return of Moscow, in the company of two sympathetic passengers lovers of patriotic songs and strong alcohol. By their side, Kornev smiles and falls asleep. Just before, furtively, we saw a mist of worry in his gaze-the terrible and fleeting feeling that, from this trip, he may not come back.
Two prosecutorsby Sergei Loznitsa, with Alexandre Kouznetsov… in the cinema on September 24.
