Two Prosecutors & Dossier 137 — eerie portraits of lives crushed under absolute power

Indian Express

16-05-2025

A succession of similar scenes, in which the protagonist is seen waiting in a hard, straight-backed chair, in dreary brown rooms ruled over by dreary brown bureaucrats, is amongst the most telling leitmotifs of Sergei Lozintsa's Cannes competition entry Two Prosecutors.
You can wait all you want, but in the end, Godot will keep you waiting.
The film is set in 1938, 'at the height of Stalinist terror,' and is about a newly-appointed idealistic prosecutor who receives a prisoner's letter written in blood, protesting his innocence. From then on, we see Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) attempting in all earnestness to try and meet the prisoner, who is at first only a number in a cell. The bloody weals on his body shock the young law graduate, and he sets out to meet the senior prosecutor, in the hope that the latter's intervention will help rectify matters.
Loznitsa is in familiar territory, having given us glimpses into the labyrinthine workings of Russia and his native Ukraine in his earlier work.
'Two Prosectors' doesn't deviate from bleakness, but is possibly his most accessible film in the manner in which he depicts a system, locked and loaded against the less powerful. If you are below in the pecking order, there you will remain, so do not go about getting ideas above your station.
The tussle between the two prosecutors, on either side of the spectrum, one just beginning his journey, the other on top, could well have been the subject of a Kafka novel.
Nothing is stated. Open hostility can be combated, but there's nothing you can do with a perfectly calibrated official disdain that keeps you waiting endlessly, without granting you a meeting.
Adapted from political activist and gulag survivor Georgy Demidov's 1969 book, the brooding, atmospheric 'Two Prosecutors' will put you in mind of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn, and so many others who wrote movingly about a ruthless regime where human rights were turned into a joke. When Kornev requests a meeting with the prison warden, the guard can't believe it, and when he informs the man guarding a higher gate, they both burst out laughing. Some random person asking to be let into their sanctum, where they are the masters of the skeletal inmates who keep dropping dead of overwork? Preposterous.
The thing with Kornev is that he just doesn't learn. He does, finally, get to meet with the USSR's top prosecutor (Vytautas Kaniuonis). But the reception is cold, and as he recounts the story of the prisoner and his quest, it gets colder still, and the consequence is chilling.
What makes the well-performed 'Two Prosecutors' such a compelling watch is that it may speak of a bygone era, but with rising authoritarianism in so many parts of the world, it feels even more sharply relevant.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. 'Dossier 137', a police procedural deftly directed by Dominik Moll, has a thematic similarity with 'Two Prosecutors' in the way it shows how traditional power structures are kept in place by every single stakeholder. Those who rock the boat are considered trouble-mongers, not the actual perpetrators themselves.
The French movie, also in competition, unfolds as a series of interrogations interspersed with bursts of action in Paris and the countryside. When a young man is shot and badly injured during a demonstration that turns violent, conscientious police officer Stephanie ( Lea Drucker) starts to investigate. She finds many troubling facts and a cover-up: as it is, she is part of a much-reviled group tasked to keep an eye on internal affairs, and in this instance, she finds, through a video of the incident, that her colleagues were directly involved.
What follows is hard to watch as the complicit cops show that they are masters at deflection and active lying. Stephanie's superior takes her up on a fact she believes the former kept deliberately hidden: that she belongs to the same town as the victim, and that that makes her biased. Racism is at work here too, in the shape of a black cleaner who displays the weary cynicism of the oppressed. When you know you aren't going to win, what's the point of making a noise and calling attention to yourself?
May as well watch cat videos, the way an old lady does in the movie, to keep the darkness at bay.