Fuss around the court – Newspaper Kommersant No. 35 (7480) dated 03/01/2023

Nikolai Lebedev’s Nuremberg is released, dedicated to the trial of Nazi criminals in 1946. However, in reality, the authors came up with a completely clumsy mixture of spy thriller and melodrama, for which the Nazis, their crimes and punishments serve as nothing more than a backdrop. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The film starts with a dramatic prologue: late at night, in the dark, in the rain, a man in a striped prison uniform tries to escape from a concentration camp. He manages to hide from guards and searchlights, crawl under barbed wire and break out of the camp, he runs along a muddy road, falls exhausted, brushes and pencils fall out of his hands into the mud. Then we hear a few words in German, spoken by someone who discovered him, and the action is transferred to Berlin in the last days of April 1945, where Soviet soldiers in clean, dust-free tunics (and also hung with orders and medals, as is usually the case on the front line) make their way under shelling to the Reichstag. The bet on historical accuracy and credibility from the first frames, in a word, is high.

Among these soldiers is military translator Igor Volgin (Sergey Kempo, who appeared in episodes of Lebedev’s previous films Legend No. 17 and Crew, plays his first major role here). A couple of months later, he works in the Soviet military prosecutor’s office in Berlin and suddenly receives a bundle of letters forwarded to his field mail address – these are the news that his brother Nikolai, who was considered missing, sent his mother from the front. From this find, it somehow follows that Nikolai may be alive and be in Nuremberg, where, by coincidence, a large-scale international trial of Nazi criminals is being prepared. Igor asks his commander (Igor Petrenko) to send him there. At first, for the sake of order, he portrays severity, but then he shows paternal care and agrees.

In Nuremberg, Volgin comes under the command of Major Migachev (Yevgeny Mironov in a fake mustache and with the same strict but fair look as the previous commander), who, together with his team, ensures the work of Soviet prosecutors at trial. However, our hero is more interested in the search for his brother, during which he meets the Russian girl Lena (Lyubov Aksenova), who was driven to work in Germany during the war. Igor immediately falls in love with her, although he believes that she, like all those who were captured and labor slavery, is a traitor to the Motherland. Lena, on the other hand, is somehow connected with an underground cell of the unfinished Nazis, headed by a certain Helmut (the SS officer on duty of the national patriotic cinema, Wolfgang Czerny), who seeks at all costs to prevent the trial from taking place. And it doesn’t matter in what way: they seem to be equally satisfied with both the escape of the accused with the prospect of the revival of the Great Reich, and their untimely death before the verdict.

The authors of “Nuremberg” position their picture as the first feature film showing the events of the main process, when Hitler’s most senior comrades-in-arms appeared before the court: Goering (Karsten Nörgaard), Keitel (Ludwig Holburg), Jodl (Thorsten Krohn) and so on. Technically, this is true: Stanley Cramer’s double-Oscar-winning Nuremberg Trial (1961) deals with a separate trial of Nazi lawyers, while Yves Simoneau’s Nuremberg (2000), for which Brian Cox won an Emmy, is a two-part series. TV movie.

The director Lebedev wrote the script together with Alexander Zvyagintsev, the former Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia (he held this position from 2000 to 2016), who is a great specialist in the Nuremberg trials. At the age of 12, he wrote a poem about him, and then several books, documentaries and fiction, including the play “Nuremberg Waltz” and the novel “Forever and Ever” published in 2011, which formed the basis of the picture. Perhaps it is the choice of the primary source that explains the fact that, despite such a deep knowledge of the writer of the subject, the process itself in the film is surprisingly small. In fact, we see only three episodes from it. At the first hearing, the defendants argue that no, Germany did not attack the Soviet Union, but delivered a preemptive strike, otherwise it would have attacked it itself; in the middle, prosecutor Rudenko (Sergei Bezrukov) shows chronicles from the death camps, as well as lampshades made of human skin and similar nightmarish evidence of crimes against humanity; and finally, at the end of the trial, the defendants still stubbornly deny their guilt, but are still sentenced to death.

The main timing is occupied by lines intertwined with each other: conditionally detective with the search for Nikolai, espionage with indispensable double agents dug in right in the Soviet headquarters, and love. Their performance is more reminiscent of other works by Alexander Zvyagintsev, namely the series of action films in paperbacks “Skif” and “Sarmat” and their film adaptations. Unless there is much less suspense and action in Nuremberg – either the juiciest pieces fell out during editing (the film, like many domestic blockbusters, desperately resembles a series hastily squeezed to two hours), or the authors were still pressed by the consciousness of responsibility, which did not give turn around and arrange on the screen a truly sprawling alternative history.