p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> <\/p>\n
In Sergei Loznitsa\u2019s new drama, stairwells are sinister. Hallways hum with invisible menace. The primary colors are drab grays and ugly browns. Faces are unsmiling. And the doors are always locked.<\/p>\n
There are many ways to portray authoritarianism, but \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d is penetrating in its depiction of a society being slowly poisoned. The film might be too much to bear if it wasn\u2019t so brilliantly conceived and executed.<\/p>\n
It is 1937 in the Soviet Union. Filming in a constricting boxy aspect ratio, the Ukrainian director takes us inside a corroding prison filled with men unjustly incarcerated as enemies of the state. An elderly man is tasked with burning the inmates\u2019 letters to Stalin pleading to have their appeals heard. But one prisoner\u2019s request doesn\u2019t go up in smoke: a note written in blood by an aging Bolshevik professing his innocence.<\/p>\n
Soon afterward, our main character, a newly hired prosecutor named Kornev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), arrives at the prison, the note in hand. He plans to investigate the inmate\u2019s claims. The rest of \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d will concern the myriad forces conspiring to thwart his efforts.<\/p>\n
Inspired by a novella by Soviet physicist Georgy Demidov, who chronicled his own harrowing experiences in the gulag from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d unfolds with ominous efficiency. Determined to set things right, Kornev insists on seeing the prisoner, Stepniak, only to discover how difficult such a seemingly straightforward request proves to be. Talk to the supervisor, he\u2019s first told. After hours cooling his heels, Kornev is then informed that Stepniak is ill with an infectious disease \u2014 come back another time. But Kornev is young and infused with an idealistic zeal, refusing to let these goons stonewall him.<\/p>\n
The film\u2019s claustrophobic framing, paired with a locked-down camera, quickly creates a clammy unease. There is no violence in \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d but the threat of aggression never subsides. Loznitsa includes multiple terse scenes of Kornev walking up endless stairs or waiting for a perturbed guard to unlock a door that will lead him to another door that also requires a key. Editor Danielius Kokanauskis cuts these sequences with Swiss-clock precision, mirroring the cruel precision of Soviet bureaucracy. Working with his regular cinematographer Oleg Mutu, Loznitsa gives this prison \u2014 and authoritarianism itself \u2014 a sickly luster without ever denying its wretched stench.<\/p>\n
When Kornev finally speaks with Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), who was himself once an idealistic lawyer, he shows the outraged young man the abuse he\u2019s endured at the hands of the Soviet secret police. To get to this point was enough of an undertaking for Kornev, but he now must take on an even more challenging task: traveling by train to Moscow to alert his superiors. Correctly suspecting that his local officials are in cahoots with Stalin\u2019s thugs \u2014 and that he himself may be in danger now \u2014 Kornev can only pray that the General Prosecutor (Anatoli Beliy) will take action. Kornev knows what country he lives in, but he hasn\u2019t given up hope that justice still exists. And so he steps out of line to test his theory.<\/p>\n
With few words, Kuznetsov projects such decency and conviction that he recalls any number of virtuous fictional lawyers of yesteryear who stood up to evil. And as an accomplished narrative filmmaker and documentarian, Loznitsa unveils deft homages to Jacques Tati and Roy Andersson, deadpan directors who reduce human behavior to its base movements. In \u201cTwo Prosecutors,\u201d the inert nobodies blocking Kornev\u2019s progress are crisply choreographed, Stalin\u2019s existential choke hold strangling their very spirit.<\/p>\n
As the obstacles mount against Kornev, his paranoia grows, leading to fleeting moments of surrealism. When a nameless secretary drops a sheaf of papers, Kornev\u2019s response to help is instinctive, yet we cringe at the careless faux pas he commits in this unfeeling society. Later, a stranger gleefully approaches Kornev, convinced he knows him, and the effect is chilling \u2014 a glitch in the matrix in which human connection briefly flourishes.<\/p>\n
No film since Jonathan Glazer<\/a>\u2019s wizardly \u201cThe Zone of Interest\u201d<\/a> has wielded such a meticulously controlled formal approach to visualizing the insidiousness of moral rot. But unlike that Oscar winner, \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d has a man of conscience at its center \u2014 a confident crusader who becomes increasingly puny in the face of Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union. With Trump back in office, American audiences are understandably more closely watching films from distant lands that dramatize authoritarianism, seeking clues from those nations\u2019 past to understand our present.<\/p>\n \u201cTwo Prosecutors\u201d offers no guidance and certainly no happy ending. Many viewers will correctly predict this young lawyer\u2019s fate, but Loznitsa isn\u2019t after plot twists; he\u2019s more interested in the gut punch of the inevitable. Kornev\u2019s tragedy is that, while he may not be behind bars, he can\u2019t see the prison he\u2019s trapped in.<\/p>\n ‘Two Prosecutors’<\/p>\n In Russian and Ukrainian, with subtitles<\/p>\n Not rated<\/p>\n Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes<\/p>\n Playing: Opens Friday, March 27 at Laemmle Royal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> In Sergei Loznitsa\u2019s new drama, stairwells are sinister. Hallways hum with invisible menace. The primary colors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[107209,21687,107207,3747,9923,1924,24710,107204,48,52,51,47,50,49,1555,23178,7214,20432,107205,107206,107208],"class_list":["post-237593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-aleksandr-kuznetsov","tag-authoritarianism","tag-corroding-prison","tag-door","tag-face","tag-film","tag-hand","tag-kornev","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-man","tag-note","tag-prosecutor","tag-prosecutors","tag-sergei-loznitsa","tag-stalin","tag-stepniak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}