User Reviews

'Gruz 200' stands for Russian soldiers' corpses transported from war zones. Also it is the title of the most controversial film of controversial Aleskey Balabanov, which focuses not only on lives and deaths of different people but describes death-bed and decay of the Soviet system.

Plot. It was a desire of the director not to give too many details of the plot and therefore it is going to be disclosed here very briefly. The events take place in 1984 Soviet Union, small and depressing industrial town. A daughter of a big-shot government officer is kidnapped by a demented police man who falls in love with her in a very sick way.

Genre. The director refers to his work as a thriller. The atmosphere of the film is extremely tense which grips the audience until the very end. Some scenes of the film are pure horror on the verge of extremely dark and absurd comedy. But one should bear in mind that the word "comedy" may be deceptive. It is a very serious film in fact, raising problems of religion, faith, love, power, life and death, good and evil.

Controversy. The film is extremely violent and disturbing (many famous actors refused to take part in it, including E. Mironov; the film did not receive a single award at Kinotavr film festival in Sochi, while on the other hand many critics acclaimed it, calling it a brilliant work or Balabanov's best film). Although the major part of the violence is off-screen, the shock level that the movie delivers is maximal (to some extent the film resembles Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noe and Lars Von Trier films). The disturbance is caused not so much by what you physically see but rather by what you witness happening – by the fact that such things can be done by human beings. The film does not have a single positive character. Every single major character of film is to certain extent wicked, except for one – a Vietnamese servant who dies in the first half of the movie (it is very symbolic that Balabanov, who is often criticized for being a racist chose a Vietnamese person to be the only completely positive character of the film). On the other hand, none of the characters in the movie is completely negative, even the main villain (probably one of the most evil and macabre villains in the entire film history) has a virtue – he is capable to love ("he is not a maniac, he is just a person who loves in his own way" said Balabanov when describing the character).

Music. Balabanov always carefully chooses music for his films for the creation of special atmosphere (Nautilus in Brat and modern rock bands in Brat 2). For this film the director selected very stereotypical trashy Soviet songs (plus some underground music) which definitely suit the picture. Combination of these cheesy and optimistic songs with the macabre events taking place in the film, increase the shock and disturbance level even more. One of the most memorable scenes of the movie is the villain riding his hostage handcuffed to the sidecar motorcycle accompanied by a song about a float-boat. Another memorable scene in the film demonstrates how the same aeroplane that delivers corpses of dead soldiers from Afghanistan, takes the new recruits there.

Happy ending. Very ironic pseudo-happy ending provided by the film writes the new Russian history behindhand, suggesting that nothing will change to good: atheists will receive baptism but not faith, younger generation will learn how to make money but will be doing that by all manner of means (like in "Zhmurki"), one war will end where a second will begin and the county will turn into one rotting orphan corpse.

Unique, deeply disturbing combination of 'Last House on the Left' type horror, pitch-black political satire, and fury at the sickness of one's own society.

The film was said by it's director to have been explicitly made to combat the growing nostalgia, fueled by Putin, for Soviet era Russia.

Based on true events that occurred in 1984, as the Soviet Union sank ever deeper into the Afghanistan quagmire ('Cargo 200' is the code names for bodies being brought back from the war), this depiction of a 'Deliverance' type grotesque family who sell illegal booze to finance their fantasy of one day creating a utopia in the middle of nowhere, and the complete psychopath of a police captain 'friend' who protects, but ultimately turns on them, and ends up committing murder, along with rape, torture and kidnapping of a young girl who happens by – all while being paid by the government.

The slow build is handled pretty brilliantly, and we're surprised over and over at exactly who turns out to do what – although the feeling of doom hovers over the film from it's first moments. By the end of the film, the depravity is so insane, and depicted in such a matter- of-fact way, that the only reaction one can have is to laugh a terribly disturbed, uncomfortable laugh.

It's as if Balabanov took torture porn, but turned it into the darkest possible comedy performance-art by having it comment on the world in a bigger way (but isn't that really what all the truly great horror films do?)

The cinematography is also 'beautiful' in its almost loving framing of ugliness, both human and industrial.

Major plot questions are left unanswered, but that doesn't feel like sloppy film-making, but rather an intentional (if frustrating) method of making us ponder what we've just witnessed, instead of being able to walk away and forget.

Some of the acting is awkward, but there are images I that will stick with me a long time, and I have the feeling the film might grow even deeper on repeated viewings. It isn't often you read various critics comparing a film to both the Coen bothers and 'Saw', or a critic saying 'it made me want to puke, and I mean that as a high complement', but it's that much a one-of- a-kind film.

All the hype around the 'truth' about Soviet Union is appalling. After Russian movie-makers "broke free" from the "totalitarian hell" there is nothing to stop them from making any kind of black fiction story their imagination can possibly produce. The Hollywood may have self-censorship to not put a maniac into police uniform, but it clearly was not the case with Balabanov. His original idea was apparently create a picture as shocking to the public as possible, and he succeeded well.

All of you guys who still fight the Cold war in 2013 are like that madman who reads aloud war letters in a room with two corpses.

It's a horror film about maniac with details of his crimes. It's not about the USSR and it's not a historical movie. The director pretends on a great depth of meaning but really it's horror in "social realism" style. If you never live in the USSR in 80th you can think that the whole life was the same like in this movie. I.e. maniacs, criminals integrated in the police and in the society. But reality differs from this like Charles Manson differs from usual man. Balabanov is a good provoker. He wanted sensation at any cost and he received it with naturalistic acts of violence and with decomposing men bodies. It's a very cheap way but if you haven't talent and ideas just remake "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in another surrounding and call it drama instead of horror and voilà - you are modern fancy new wave director!

Cargo 200 is set in an average Russian industrial town of Leninsk in late 1984 right after the demise of Gen Sec Andropov against the backdrop of agonizing Soviet regime's decay.

An airhead daughter of a local high ranking Communist Party official befriends a young dipsomaniac at a rural disco. After the party's over the lad offers to drive her home. But first he proposes to drop by at a nearby countryside community to replenish the supply of booze.

Eventually he leaves the girl in the car and walks to a farmhouse where dwells a family of an ex con who makes his living in trading home-brewed alcohol.

After a while the girl startled by a bystander (peeping at her through the windshield) rushes to the house only to find her stone dead drunk pal collapsing out of the table in front of the similarly wrecked host.

The (jealous) housewife aware of her husband's nasty temper locks the girl in a bath house promising to release her when the man calms down and falls asleep.

In the meantime the creepy guy that scared the girl enters the house and is offered a plate of mushroom soup. After boarding with the family's domestic helper, a Vietnamese handyman, the man requests the latter to open the bath house for him.

There they discover the poor girl paralyzed with fear hiding in the distant room.

That's where all the "fun" begins.

The next morning the sleepy little town is overwhelmed by sinister rumors of the missing apparatchik's daughter and the slaughter of the Vietnameze helper at the neighborhood's household.

That was a clever and original premise of the latest film from the acclaimed Russian director Alexei Balabanov.

In his own words - "this is just a movie about the year of 1984 as I recollect it, as I conceive it and see it. I wanted to produce a harsh film on the decline of the Soviet Union - hence I made it".

Well, in the director's notion the hallmarks of the departing Soviet era (as we see it in the movie) are:

• Countrywide heavy drinking (the majority of the screen time is devoted to exposure of different states of alcohol intoxication);

• Total miscreance (a belief in the only creative force on earth - the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - was in fact an attribute of the Soviet society; amazingly the only apologist of the Christianity in the movie is a derelict felon);

• Miserable existence of the millions of Soviet families (the art directors of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series may envy the cast and crew of Cargo 200 - such stunning interiors, make-up effects and myriads of those realistically looking (and sounding) flies lavishly exhibited in the movie can hardly be found in a big budget Hollywood production).

The title of the movie refers to a military euphemism that stands for the massive deliveries of zinc coffins from the combat operations in Afghanistan. A highlight of the film is the scene where Captain Zhurov is reading out loud the letters of late Sergeant Gorbunov addressed to his sobbing fiancé. Very touchy and heartwarming. And definitely not for the faint of heart.

Honestly, it is really difficult to define a precise genre which this obscure film belongs to.

Balabanov himself is more inclined to consider it a thriller. Let us reckon on his view. But I wonder which particular chunks of the film might be regarded as thrilling or suspenseful. Well, perhaps it might be engrossing dialogs on the religious issues, drunken car / motorcycle rides across empty motorways, police raids, oh yeah - I nearly forgot those disturbing and graphic rape, torture and obsession scenes. In this meaning it delivers in abundance.

But unfortunately one essential ingredient is missing, i.e. an articulate plot that might have glued together those logically unbalanced and chronologically fragmentary bits and pieces into a solid and convincing storyline.

Yet this repetitive and irritating soundtrack is unlikely to be conducive to the overall impression.

I seriously doubt that the Russians that have so far established their own mixed feelings and attitude towards the country's past may find something useful in the film that could have helped them to refresh their memories or reconsider their views. It can also be misleading to overseas audience familiar with even worse image of Russia portrayed before in western movies and compelled to judge a book by its cover.

It may however be recommended to those curious about how executions in Soviet jails (before the death penalty ban) actually looked like.

Here is what Balabanov wants to tell us. "Russian people" (Aleksey) drinks, believes in God and dreams of the City of the Sun. "Russian people" sat in prison in the past (reference to the Gulag) and remains indebted to "political regime" (Captain Zhurov). The latter of course is a mockery of the Soviet propaganda's idea that people "owe" a lot to Soviet power. Zhurov commits a crime by killing a Vietnamese (which can be read as the regime's crimes against the non-Russians), but it is the "people" (Aleksey) who become inculpated and executed. "Remember, you owe me something," says Captain Zhurov ("political regime") to Aleksey ("the people").

"Russia" is represented simultaneously as a mother (Captain Zhurov's alcoholic mother), a wife (Antonina, Aleksey's wife) and a bride (Angelica). Political regime turns "Russia-as-mother" into a hopeless degenerate (through alcohol and TV addiction). Then, political regime turns "Russia-as-wife" into a widow (the execution of Aleksey – "the people") and finally it violates "Russia-as-bride". It first presents "Russia-as-bride" with a dead corpse of her bride-groom (paratrooper killed in Afghanistan (or Chechnia?)). Since, "political regime" (and Captain Zhurov) is sexually impotent and cannot substitute the bride-groom, it has an ugly criminal (urka) violate "Russia-as-bride" (Angelika) and then completes the girl's torment by reading her the letters of the dead fiancée (Soviet propaganda's cynical play on the sacred feelings?). "Political regime" professes love to "Russia-as-bride" but opines that this love is unrequited. Antonina ("Russia-as-widow") kills Captain Zhurov (a reference to Russian rebellion), but that of course does not restore the lost purity of Angelica ("Russia-as-bride") Russian rebellion is, after all, bloody and senseless.

The crucial thing is that the story does not show the way towards redemption. The teacher of "scientific atheism" (Artem) comes to the Church to be baptized, but the sacrament (if it really happened) remains off-screen. The bottom-line is that political regime is a sadist violator from which there is no escape.

In the end, what effect did the director seek to achieve with such a representation? Only one: he wanted the viewer to have the feeling that it is he or she who has (is) been violated. Both the rape featured in this film and the symbolic rape that is stands for, serve to obscure the fact that the actual rape happens in the course of watching the film and that the real rapist is not Zhurov (political regime) or its proxy (criminal), but the film itself. Its goal is to turn the people watching it into a raped subject and thereby complete the material, moral and psychological destruction that the country has experienced for a quarter of a century. It imposes upon the viewer a socio-political imagery (characters and relations between them) which deranges the mind, paralyzes the will and renders meaningless any action. It is the deadliest film I have seen in my life. It should have been cut to pieces and its director placed into a mental asylum, for, needless to say, the fantasy of inescapable rape could emerge only in a profoundly diseased mind.

I have sympathy for the view that this dark, dark comedy from Balabanov is much too culturally pointed to impress a westerner beyond the more obvious clues and intents of the writer and director. Balabanov's movie articulates the classically Russian 'tragic view of life' (articulated by Antonina: 'the sooner we die, the better for us') and it is through this prism that it views the moral and material decay of the Soviet system. Captain Zhurov's depravity and necrophilia is not psychological. The filmmaker does not even pretend to study Zhurov's motives: it is the bare fact that the police chief has authority and uses it to his own sociopath's ends that matters (Balabanov cleverly keeps the audience from discovering Zhurov's professional identity until after he is outed as an insane murderer).

What makes 'Gruz 200' Balabanov's best film and a true classic is the sort-of passerby attitude of the narration, and his insistence that he is not as serious as he appears to be. He delivers the most shocking and revolting scene with a healthy dose of the absurd kind of humour(says insane mama to the visiting lady with a shotgun in her suitcase: 'too many flies this summer'), and in this he resembles Tarantino's killing-is-comedy trademark. But the Russian director actually is committed to a point of view, and acknowledgement that humans have soul, something that would fall beyond Tarantino's understanding, or at any rate, his artistic grasp.

'Sunka', the Vietnamese migrant worker is the torch of humanity in the movie. Balabanov, here and elsewhere, pokes into the renowned Russian chauvinism and racism, in choosing for his saintly innocent an Asiatic who speaks broken Russian. (Dersu Uzala, anyone ?) It appears that the 'conversion' of the atheist professor Gromov, is linked to the death of Sunka, and to his boss Aleksey's convincing argument against atheism - i.e. his refusal to believe that human 'conscience' is a material effect of Darwinian evolution. Balabanov cleverly underplays Gromov's visit to the church by making the priest absent. (This saves the movie from turning preachy). The director also makes excellent use of the industrial wasteland (so much reminiscent of Tarkovsky's "Zone" in the "Stalker") and the dilapidating housing standards in the late Soviet era, as the background for his farce.

In fact - I'd say it's horror movie. It's dark. Not only suroundings are dark, but people too. Dark city, with old, rotten buildings, Dark people with no vision of future - young people going to rotten disco and drinking, older people just drinking at home ( on day off). Mother of captain Zhurov totally disconnected from worl having only her chair, vodka and TV with Russian propaganda and concerts ( World in TV shows was much better, than reality). The kidnapper cares about his mother, he's not too bad, but he can't find a woman ( because of his low self worth and impotence), he wants love and to be loved. The movie is sad, because there is no future.

This film completely stands for a political view, neo-liberalism. An atheist university professor criticizes faith an god with an ex-gulag prisoner who sells grain alcohol from his murky, grubby, and isolated home. However, he aims or just fancies to reach "the city of sun". A Soviet officer, who has sadistic thoughts and a killer, kidnaps a teenager then takes home to meet his abnormal mother. These are all showed to be interesting. Is that so? A socialist country can have such a mad people? Of course, yes. The today's capitalist countries have too many cases like this film shows us. Look around your country, presidents having sex with secretaries, ministers who ex-change their wife and having sex with each others children. It is not convincing that this film is based on real experienced things by the way. To sum up, i would like to ask a question: "Does this kind of political and moral degradation decrease or increase in Russia?". I should advise Aleksey Balbanov to analyze today's ethic, political and moral values of Russia and compare them with the past.

Mr. Balabanov's latest work was tagged as "not for the squeamish", and it certainly lived up to that claim. Any other achievements? Up for debate.

Perhaps for some the abundance of gratuitous gruesomeness in the bleak setting of industrial U.S.S.R town combined with some well-selected rock tunes makes for a masterpiece or at least for powerful film-making. For me Cargo 200 was a movie which hesitated for half of it whether to tell us about the gloom of the Soviet 80s, or about pointlessness of the war (whether as a literal tale of Afghan or an allegory for Chechnya), or about a professor of scientific atheism starting to question his beliefs in the times of glasnost before eventually deciding to go to its main storyline: Captain Zhurov's perverted affection for a young daughter of high-ranking communist official.

Captain Zhurov appears out of nowhere (10 second shot of his creepy face excluded), right of the bat commits several highly disturbing acts of violence, and proceeds in similar vein throughout the rest of the movie . Balabanov himself said that, paraphrasing his words, the movie was about a different (read highly crazy) man falling in love and trying to conquer the girl's heart with unconventional techniques. Well, the center story that was told in the movie could have happened anywhere, which one could argue suggests theme's universality, but combined with the amount of detail devoted to recreation of the feel of 80's USSR is nothing but incongruous. Even the title of the movie, Cargo 200, bears little relation to the plot, aside from the fact that Cargo 200 contains the girl's fiancé whose dead body is unceremoniously dumped next to her. Mr. Balabanov is without a doubt a talented director, who says he alternates between big projects like Brat and the edgy/artsy ones like Cargo. Lets just hope his next commercial movie is better than this one.

Russian director Aleksei Balabanov has made a number of excellent movies such as "Of Freaks and Men"; his "Cargo 200" is the darkest he's done. Set in '84, when the Soviet Union was at a very low ebb, it is a deceptively simple story of institutionalized brutality and the death of ideology. A young woman becomes the victim of a deeply disturbed police officer whose evil actions deliberately impact those closest to her. Tonally, this is as bleak as "Irreversible", "Pixote", or the Turkish "Journey of Hope". Balabanov directs with precision and economy, never wasting a shot or a gesture. The characters feel real and the situations emerge from instantly familiar situations. Popular music from the place and time is used to good effect. Sound effects work is incredibly rich and unnerving. Performances are all top notch. The "relationship" between the kidnapped woman and the police officer reaches dizzying heights of depravity when her dead boyfriend's corpse is thrown into the mix. We have characters so brutalized by the harsh realities of the past that the realities of the present barely touch their leather, delusional facades. Although the film avoids bloodiness on a grand scale, it contains disturbing instances of frightful violence.