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‘Two Prosecutors’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa Takes Us on a Darkly Absurdist Odyssey Through the Soviet Totalitarian Nightmare
An idealistic young state lawyer attempts to take the case of a wrongfully imprisoned man in Sergei Loznitsa's mordantly relevant 'Two Prosecutors.'
While hatchet-faced guards bark orders in the scaffolded courtyard — a masterful bit of production design from Jurij Grigorovič and Aldis Meinerts in which the rickety wooden backdrop looks like a gigantic tic-tac-toe with every square an X — an almost comical, pompous trumpet parps and gives the whole minutely choreographed image a touch of Jacques Tati. The desaturated palette, the man’s pallor, the shaft of cold light in which he sits — the shot could be a classical painting of Methuselah or Moses, and the heroically beautiful framing of this unheroic and ugly act is a perfect sampler of the ironic tone Loznitsa maintains by the caustic deployment of form against content. There, at the top of a seemingly never-ending staircase in a monumental municipal building, his distant superior, the blank-faced bureaucrat Vyshynsky (Anatoli Beliy), occupies an enormous office and takes short, ruthless meetings with supplicants according to a strictly enforced schedule.
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