Cargo 200
by Alexey Balabanov
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Actor: Alexei Poluyan, Alexei Serebryakov, Leonid Gromov, Natalya Akimova, Yuri StepanovDirector: Alexey Balabanov
Brand: WEA DES Moines Video
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Russian (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 89 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-04-28
Audience Rating: Unrated
Model: 620050
Studio: The Disinformation Company
Product features:
- The title of Russian director Alexey Balabanov's twelfth film is a military term for the coffins transporting dead soldiers back home during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The effects of that decade-long conflict provide a unifying theme for this highly controversial film that recalls the work of Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke but with a distinctly Russian point-of-view. Cargo 200 begins
DVD Reviews of Cargo 200
DVD Review: A brilliant journey into the absurd.
Summary: 4 Stars
Gruz 200 (Alexei Balabanov, 2007)
I just found out Friday night, while paging through the brochure for this year's Cleveland International Film Festival (where once again I cannot afford to go to even one-tenth of the movies I'd like to see that are screening there), that Alexei Balabanov was given the inaugural Directors to Watch award in 2003 (presumably, though it didn't say, for his multi-award-winning War, one of two 2002 features he directed). No matter that Balabanov has been playing his trade since the eighties. Until recently, Balabanov was best-known for Brother, a hard-hitting drama starring the late Sergei Bodrov, Jr., killed in an icefall in 2002, at the age of thirty. (If the name sounds vaguely familiar, his father directed the international megahit Mongol, starring Tadanobu Asano, in 2008.) That all changed a few years ago. Not with the release of Gruz 200, Balabanov's absurdist satire of life in Socialist Russia; Kino did an international theatrical release, but it played a few film festivals (including CIFF in 2008, where I missed it entirely) and limited runs in Greece and New York, and then left the big screen until well after its DVD premiere (oddly, it opened in Belgium in November of 2009, eight months after it was released on DVD). The press ignored it almost entirely, especially in America; it shouldn't surprise anyone given what I said above that Rotten Tomatoes lists three newspaper reviews for the film from America, and they were in the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Village Voice. All three of those reviews are positive, which tells you exactly what the rest of America's distribution network actually thinks about all those movies that only ever open in New York and LA. No, the groundswell that has turned Gruz 200 into a cult hit didn't start until the DVD release in 2009. It's been gradually building ever since. And me, I'm just doing my part to contribute. We Americans don't spend nearly enough time thinking about the Russian film scene. The fact that Mongol opened in America at all, much less showed in a multiplex in the relative cinematic backwater of Cleveland, Ohio, was to me a triumph of international film marketing (though let's face it, that had way more to do with Tadanobu Asano being a marketable name than it did Sergei Bodrov, whom no one in this country had ever heard of before Mongol, with the arguable exception of Jonathan Rosenbaum). We're insular in our flicks here (though the Brits have a free pass into our multiplexes); if you're going to make a movie with subtitles, you'd darned well be an American (Mel Gibson and Cary Fukunaga both come to mind immediately as having gotten wide releases of subtitled films in the past decade). So we generally miss things like Gruz 200. We are the worse for it.
The story centers around Angelika (The Phobos' Agniya Kuznetsova in her screen debut), the Russian fiancee of a soldier who's off in Afghanistan. The time is 1984, the place is Moscow. Her father, Artem (Butterfly Kiss' Leonid Gromov), is a Professor of Scientific Atheism at Moscow University. Artem's brother Mikhail (Yuri Stepanov, who died in a car accident during the filming of The Edge, a Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011) is a higher-up muckety-muck in the army. Angelika's best friend's boyfriend, Valera (Once Upon a Time in the Provinces' Leonid Bichevin, also in his screen debut), is a drunk, and possibly a smuggler, though her family thinks he's a nice, innocent boy. While Valera and said friend are supposed to be off for an extended vacation the next day, Angelika runs into him at a nightclub, and the two of them head off to Valera's boss Aleksey (Junk's Aleksey Serebryakov)'s house to get some more liquor after the place closes. (Coincidentally, Artem had also wandered in there earlier with a flat.) Through a series of misadventures, Angelika ends up in the clutches of Zhurov (the late Alexei Poluyan, who passed away from chronic pancreatitis shortly after completing The Edge), a corrupt army officer and sociopath whose alcoholic mother thinks that it's perfectly okay that he keeps his "girlfriend" chained to a bed in his room. All of it--the kidnapping, the search for Angelika, Mikhail's increasingly frantic attempts to find Angelika's fiancee--are handed to us as a bureaucratic nightmare from which there is no escape. (Almost every review on IMDB tells you one key piece of cultural information about the title that could be considered a spoiler, so if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, don't read them.)
Gruz 200 was conceived as a satire, and a satire it is, but take heed that it is a bitter, angry satire that uses the techniques of exploitation film to tell its story (after all, the central plot is that Angelika is kidnapped by an officer of the law, chained to a bed, and held hostage, tortured, and raped). That said, Gruz 200 is, for being as black and ugly as it is, a remarkably funny movie; Balabanov has certainly digested the idea that laughing is the only way to stop crying in some situations (in this, it reminds me in an odd way of Kassovitz' La Haine, though this is by far the funnier of the two movies). Much has been made of the picture's extreme violence. And while I'm certainly not going to dispute that yes, it is rather a violent picture, much of the violence to be found here is of the emotional variety; Balabanov knows how to use physical violence in just the right amounts to be shocking without desensitizing the viewer. (One of the main subplots has to do with Aleksey--whom more than one reviewer has posited is meant as synecdochic of the entire Russian populace under the Socialist regime, circa 1984--killing his handyman, Sunka.) Balabanov is obviously treading a very thin wire here, taking this source material and making it into comedy, but he's following in a tried-and-true tradition of absurdist tragedy in Europe in the twentieth century; the obvious name is Pirandello, but you can find it everywhere from Beckett to Bunuel, and much of it deals with tragedy. All Balabanov has done is take the conventions of exploitation film and add them to the mix; I'm surprised no one did it before.
As for the medicine going down, there are a number of spoonsful of sugar, with the biggest of them being the surprising performances turned in by first- (but not last-) timers Kuznetsova and Bichevin, who are wonderful, and stand up to the rest of this far-more-experienced acting crowd, all of whom bring their A games. I've already mentioned that Balabanov is a much-lauded director, mostly for Brother and War, but Cargo 200 won him Best Director at the Gijon International Film Festival as well as an award at Rotterdam. The guy's good at what he does, and he has an eye for detail that some directors simply gloss over (much has been mentioned in reviews of all the award-winners he's directed, for example, of how intimately the music in any given film is linked to the content). The settings are uniformly bleak, which is interesting given how disparate they are (think Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance here; in fact, I've been thinking about that for a few days, and given some of the set design here, it would not surprise me if Balabanov had been informed by Jost somewhere along the way), and shows a strong sense of the power of juxtaposition. Of course, making a movie like this and successfully passing it off as a comedy did that already.
(Oh, and note to self: must see The Edge soon. Sounds cursed.) *** 1/2
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