The plays of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett were, no doubt, seasoned with schools of oppression that had grown up in the middle years of the 20th century. A man in a cell alone carrying out pointless minor tasks. Two men facing each other across a table. Another man striving for release unaware he is already contained in an inescapable trap.
Sergei Loznitsa, the great Ukrainian director of contemporary nightmares such as Donbass and A Gentle Creature, here winds that absurd theatre in with historical inspirations from Soviet purges of the 1930s.
Adapted from Georgy Demidov’s suppressed novel of the same name – written in 1969 but not published until 2009 – Two Prosecutors is consistently comic without ever being properly funny. It is the humour of hopeless fatalism. You know. Two old men stand at the graveside after a funeral. “Hardly worth our while going home,” one says to the other. That sort of thing.
It is 1937, and we begin with an ancient prisoner being assigned a simple but politically significant task. He is to burn all the letters written by detained party members attesting innocence – and revealing abuse – to the highest sources in the land. Why not dump them all in a furnace? Well, then you wouldn’t have such an effective symbol of malign and pointless bureaucracy.
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And you wouldn’t have a plot. One letter, written in blood, gets through and lures an idealistic young prosecutor named Kornev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to the prison in Bryansk. The missive is from one IS Stepniak, an old Bolshevik who has tales to tell of how the revolution has been betrayed.
The two men get on all right. Kornev mentions that he attended speeches given by Stepniak. The old man displays the wounds he received as the interrogators failed to torture him into confession. Enlightened and appalled, Kornev boards a train for Moscow and makes his way to the prosecutor general’s office. Where can this lead?
Everything about Two Prosecutors speaks to the grim fatalism mentioned above. Every movement of every captor is carried out with the glacial determination of totalitarian ritual. Every conversation seems predetermined by unseen regulations.
And, of course, we know what happened in the Soviet Union. Writing 30 years after the event, Demidov assumed his potential readers would understand the hopelessness of the task Kornev has taken on.
Andrey Vyshinsky, played here with wall-eyed focus by Anatoliy Beliy, really was prosecutor general of the Soviet Union and a chief player in the notorious show trials. Not the sort of fellow to listen kindly to accusations of statewide corruption.
Yet that sense of creeping inevitability adds to, rather than detracts from, the menacing appeal of a singular film that never lessens its lurching momentum. Looking like a more sombre Domhnall Gleeson, Kuznetsov carries himself with the tautness of a man determined not to give into uncomfortable realities. He is the only human in a cage of monsters – some dangerous, a small few benign.
Since the film’s premiere at Cannes 10 months ago, more than a few critics have read warnings here of what is happening – may have already happened – in one or two western democracies. But the clipped society in Two Prosecutors is very different from the blundering chaos afoot in the United States.
This is totalitarianism as a boringly efficient mechanism. Nobody is likely to mistake Two Prosecutors for One Battle After Another.
It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.
In cinemas from Friday, March 27th
