recluse2oo2

Gruz 200 (2007)

Not for the squeamish...But to what purpose?

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.