FILM OF THE WEEK: Cargo 200

Cargo 200 (Gruz 200)
Directed by Alexey Balabanov
2007, 90 minutes, Russian with English subtitles

"I show what filth we live in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards."
- Alexey Balabanov, in a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview

Some have suggested Balabanov's admirably rigorous (if unsparingly fiendish) sociopolitical button-pusher to be a black comedy, which is unusual for a film whose grimy wasteland setpieces and tense grindhouse climax fit snugly between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left; if and when there are laughs, they're decidedly the nervous kind. Set in the USSR during the back half of 1984 (and allegedly based on a true story), Cargo 200 takes its title from the shipping code for military corpses from the Afghan front, endless crates of which are frequently seen taking the train home. A single shot unsubtly but ably illustrates the title's intent: not moments after a plane is unloaded with said freight, a new battalion of soldiers marches onboard to become next week's vain sacrifices.

En route to Leninsk, a Scientific Atheism professor breaks down on the road, and seeks refuge at a remote rural shack run by seedy moonshiners. (Cue the audience screaming at the screen: "Don't go in there!"). While a pitiable Vietnamese employee repairs the car, the brutish proprietor inside engages drunkenly and belligerently with his guest about the existence of God, and blames the professor's godless Communist party for the nation's deterioration. The bootlegger's tightly wound antagonism is a suspenseful tease, as it's not until a discotheque-loving hipster drags his fiancée's girlfriend here to buy grain alcohol that the dominoes of depravity begin to fall: police corruption, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder -- and in a nauseatingly bravura finale, a tiny bedroom to house each of these sins at once. If I'm vague about the chain reactions, it's because it's crucial to let the events smack you in the face as they unfold, though Alexey Serebryakov's wonderfully self-possessed performance as the sinister police captain Zhurov (loosely based on Russian serial killer Gennady Mikhasevich, but looking mighty Putin-esque) can be singled out now before his icy deadpan stare haunts your dreams.

The film's exquisite production design re-paints the era in the muted neutral shades of industrial dilapidation, even if these production photos might suggest otherwise. The framings are beautifully spacious, but the decaying textures evoke without being romanticized or even drawing undue attention to themselves; they're merely the appropriate milieu for a story of human ugliness. Scarier than a psychodrama, but too restrained in its methodology to be called a horror flick, Cargo 200 doesn't try to titillate with shock value, and the references in the margins (aloof capitalists, ideological hypocrisy, police righting one wrong with a greater wrong, yawning ambivalence towards everyday atrocity, et al.) make all the difference. Balabanov rubs our noses in how I believe he truly sees his homeland's history, pronouncing him more a cerebral provocateur like Michael Haneke than a damaged fetishist like Eli Roth.

Cargo 200 opens today at NYC's Cinema Village. For more info, click here.

And for further reading, check out Vadim Rizov's interview with Balabanov over at the Spoutblog.

Posted by ahillis at January 2, 2009 9:25 AM