In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.
Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem. In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters.
When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers are shipped back from Afghanistan, which pretty much sums up the grim tone. Already available through Netflix, Cargo 200 receives a much-deserved if small release January 2; Balabanov’s film is appalling, but it’s also surprisingly elegant.
A few contextual things you may like to know: despite working as an interpreter for two year in the ’80s, Balabanov will only do interviews in Russian, so I spoke with him over the phone in that language. Balabanov is not what you might consider a tactful, soft-spoken guy: in an interview in 2007 with “Novaya Gazeta,” he responded to a question about charges of xenophobia with the terse statement, “In every country there are decent people and there are freaks.” Cargo 200 is his first film to be screened outside of festivals in the US in a decade, since 1997’s Brother, so I’ve included contextual notes as needed.
This might be the least safe-for-work thing I’ve ever blogged. Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s gruesome indictment of Russian devolution circa 1984 which was one of my favorite films from this year’s Fantastic Fest (it also played Telluride and Toronto in 2007), is available for viewing in nine parts on YouTube.
This is either the best way to watch this film or the worst. As I noted in my review, one of the best things about Cargo is its slow build –– it takes forever for anything actually disturbing to happen, but then once shit goes bad, it just gets worse and worse and worse –– and the power of the mounting revulsion might get lost if you’re watching it in chunks. That said, you also have the option to either skip, or skip directly towards, the really, really sick stuff. For the record, that gets started in part four. It gets much, much worse in part seven. Enjoy!
On the same weekend that The Dark Knight surpassed the original Star Wars as the second highest grossing film in United States box office history, the most recent Star Wars film, the animated Star Wars: Clone Wars, opened in third place to a disappointing $14.6 million. How is it possible that a film produced under the banner of the most recognizable brand in the cinema history––and with all the money in the world behind its promotion––barely outgross a throwaway Korean horror remake which opened on 800 fewer screens? It’s because Russia’s at war with Georgia, silly!
Well, sort of. The Guardian’s David Cox outlines a complex theory, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of both the title of George Lucas’ franchise and the phrase “evil empire” in his 80s-era rhetoric against the Russians. Cox says that even though we’ve got another president with a “plan to plant anti-missile missiles in the very eye of the Russian Death Star,” a mix of public apathy for Bush’s Wars and Clone Wars overall suckiness has resulted in both the movie and public excitement over the political conflict generally falling flat. Excerpts after the jump; your own counterarguments are expected in the comments.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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