Director: Sergey Loznita (France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine). Year of Release: 2025
1937. The opening caption tells us that we are at “The height of Stalin’s Terror”. The steel gates of a Soviet prison creak open beneath a bleak austere sky. An elderly prisoner has been sent to a cell where he is ordered to burn a bag full of letters. As he throws them on the fire, he reads as many as he can. They are almost all pleas to Stalin from prisoners who have been wrongly convicted, and want to make the Great Man aware of a flaw in the system. They are mainly folded into triangles, but one stands out.
This one is taken from the cardboard from the centre of a roll of toilet paper. It is stained in blood. It was written by a prisoner, Stepniak, an old Bolshevik who played an active role in the 1917 revolution. Stepniak is less interested in contacting Stalin than a lawyer. As a result of his letter, a lawyer, Kornyev, indeed visits the jail. Kornyev is told by the prison governor that Stepniak is infected and cannot be seen, although we know that this infection is more metaphorical than medical.
Kornyev is doggedly persistent, and finally gets to meet Stepniak, who shows his wounds, inflicted by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, an early version of the KGB. Although Stepniak first tried to contact a lawyer, his belief in the party is still absolute, so he insists that Kornyev gets the next train to Moscow to tell Stalin and the party leadership that the revolutionary values which they all share are being compromised.
After a long journey, Kornyev eventually reaches Moscow, where he is invited to sit in a full waiting room. As he ascends the stairs, a woman drops the papers she was carrying and no-one, apart from Kornyev. Moscow of 1937 is the exact opposite of the Barcelona of roughly the same time, of which George Orwell said: “Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared … Tipping was forbidden by law”.
After a long wait, Kornyev finally meets the film’s second prosecutor. Vyshinsky is the Soviet state’s chief prosecutor, and embodies its new values. He listens to Kornyev’s complaints with apparent patience, but we know (and Kornyev doesn’t) that he will do nothing about them. Well, nothing which will improve the condition of the tortured prisoners. Vyshinsky tells Kornyev to return to Bryansk to retrieve important medical documents which will help his case,
Zwei Staatsanwälte is clearly on the right side, but that doesn’t make the film Any Good or dramatically interesting of itself. There is an overbearing inevitability about the plot which pleases a certain audience (especially self-regarding critics who see the Russian revolution as naive and doomed from the start). By starting at the deepest point we are given no explanation for how the Soviet Union has arrived at its current state and given no hope that things might have been different.
This is, remember, an inspirational time. Just 20 years before the film is set, the old ruling autocracy had been overthrown with hope for a new society from below. Laws on divorce on abortion rights were passed, 50 years before anything equivalent was considered in Western European countries, And yet, less than one generation later, the Soviet Union had descended into a totaltitarian dictatorship. Is their no inquisitiveness why this might have happened?
Now I’m not expecting a dramatisation of the theory of State Capitalism, but the decision to only cover the time in which opposition was practically impossible has dramatic implications. Some critics have gasped at the drama produced by our knowledge that Kornyev is unable to avoid his fate. I just lost the buy-in which would cause me to care about what will happen. Yes, Kornyev is doomed to failure, but only because of specific editorial decisions taken by the writer.
I’ve read different interpretations of what this film is trying to show. Some insist that it is about Communist terror, others that it can also be applied to Trump’s USA. I’ve even read somewhere that it’s about Fascism, which it really isn’t. What we see here is bad, but Fascism is something else entirely. Let’s just agree that the film is about some sort of totalitarianism which each of us can interpret to refer to whatever we’d like it to represent.
But that is not the most important thing. Zwei Staatsanwälte does talk about, and clearly opposes, brutal dictatorships, but it is entirely pessimistic. It documents repression but shows no hope that this repression can be effectively resisted. The best you can offer is an individual act of self-sacrifice like Kornyev’s. There is something “Kafkaesque” in this, by which I don’t mean what you actually find in Kafka’s books, but a general impression is that they are merely humourless stories of endless bureaucracy.
The film’s one moment of attempted humour is slightly embarrassing. On the train to one of his interminable meetings, Kornyev comes across someone who claims to be an old Communist, but the technical term for what he is is “bullshit artist”. The bearded man gets in Kornyev’s face and blusters a tale of when he met Lenin, and lent him money which was never returned. He’s now on his way to see if Stalin will pay up but by now Kornyev has fallen asleep. I felt his boredom.
Zwei Staatsanwälte looks good, and if that’s all you want from a film, then you’ll be fine with it. But it has remarkably little to say. If it is merely a testament to the people who suffered Stalin’s purges, then good luck to it, but this is a drama not a documentary. And the fact that we know that this is not going to end well does not provide much dramatic tension. Compare and contrast (mainly contrast) with The Great Dictator, which saw the danger of what it was describing but at least gave us a rousing speech at the end.
CinePhil 