Cannes 2025: “Two Prosecutors,” a marvelous purge

Kornev, the protagonist of Two Prosecutors , is a strange animal. He is both a frog dozing in a pan of water on the stove, unaware that he will soon end up boiled, and a terribly stubborn donkey, charging straight into doors without ever looking around. Played by a white clown with a strange face (that of Alexander Kuznetsov, discovered in Kirill Serebrennikov's Leto ) and perpetually exhausted, he travels through the Soviet Union during the years of Stalin's great purge like a Monsieur Hulot or a Prince Myshkin, his unfathomable gaze transforming the totalitarian hell into a singular theater of the absurd. His story, adapted from a novel by Georgy Demidov (best known to us as a character in Varlam Shalamov's Gulag memoirs), begins with a visit to the nine circles of Soviet hell, namely a prison in Bryansk where the newly qualified lawyer has come to inquire about the contents of a letter sent to Moscow by a prisoner claiming to be a victim of unfair imprisonment and torture. Despite the prison chief's efforts to dissuade him, Kornev ends up obtaining an interview with Stepniak, a veteran Bolshevik who claims to be a victim of the excesses of a local NKVD at its worst.