A film by Sergei Loznitsa
With: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Belyy, Andris Keišs, Vytautas Kaniušonis, Valentin Novopolskij, Ivgeny Terletsky, Orests Paško
The film focuses on a young prosecutor who sets out to challenge a system during Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937 after discovering a letter from a prisoner that is a desperate plea for help.
Our rate: **
Sergei Loznitsa offers us a simple, facetious and Kafkaesque story, to ask us questions about fascism. He has chosen to bring to the screen a Russian short story about the behavior of the authorities and the population at the height of the Stalinist period of terror. The story, unsettling at times for its aloof humor, contrasts with the simplicity (and effectiveness) of its mise-en-scène, and presents itself to us as an enigma, summed up by the prison warden: before the revolution, a character waits in prison; after the prison, the prison waits for him, eliciting laughter from his hierarchical inferior. In the meantime, the film follows the steps and, above all, the determination of a young prosecutor to do his job well, i.e. to ensure that justice is done without error. His stubbornness, his patience, his virtuous approach, his utopia of a better world will be perceived by those around him as naiveté. Simply, relentlessly, Loznitsa shows us the three fundamentals of fascism: terror wielded by tyrants, a hierarchy that zealously follows the tyrants and sets up a system that crushes all dissent, and a population that resigns itself, keeps silent, seeks above all to avoid being seen in a bad light, and in so doing, looks askance at those who might draw them into a struggle that would make them opponents, and would in fact put them in danger. It is also based on the principle of an infinite, reflexive, Kafkaesque loop, which reflects the difficulty of extricating oneself from an installed fascism, but also refers to the administrative hell so typical of socialist dictatorships. The title, deux procureurs (two prosecutors), itself contains a great deal of irony, the main note of the whole, with the absurdity of the situation (the prosecutor has a function, but he has no power, no counter-power, and if he does, it works against him, the machine is self-sustaining). It’s worth noting that the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival had the bright idea of screening two prosecutors just before another film with a similar theme, File 137 by Dominik Moll, except that the former examines the distant past in order to question the present, while the latter focuses on the near past.