Cargo 200 (2007)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Agniya Kuznetsova as Angelika; Aleksey Poluyan as Captain Zhurov; Leonid Gromov as Artem, Professor of Scientific Atheism; Aleksey Serebryakov as Aleksey; Leonid Bichevin as Valera; Natalya Akimova as Antonina; Yuriy Stepanov as Colonel Mikhail; Mikhail Skryabin as Sunka

Canon Fodder

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

Set in 1984, near the end of the Soviet Union, during the Afghanistan War with Russia, in a world of rebellious teens and their Soviet fathers, Cargo 200 is deceptive in its prologue that, once this adaptation of William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary properly starts, the infamous film even in Aleksey Balabanov's career does feel like a grotesque experience even for him. It is a film that comes after Dead Man's Bluff (2005), a nasty parody of Brother (1997), but something more startling in contrast, from an era post-The River (2002) and films which brought the director-writer's side that is more melancholic took over. More so as the film is not presented as an adaptation of the Southern writer Faulkner's novel, but is told as a true story, this feels more provocative than offensive for the sake of it.

The title marks what the film's tone is, "Cargo 200" as a title referring to a code used in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union countries referring to the transportation of military casualties. This is a world where a professor of scientific atheism, Artem (Leonid Gromov), finds himself in the middle of the countryside, after his car broke down, in the home of a working class patriarch who wants to know where the consciousness came from over mushroom soup, cucumbers and vodka, like this is a bleak comedy from Aleksey Balabanov about the stagnation of the country in the era. Even in 1984 here, the God believer challenges the atheist for all the dead, God or otherwise, left strewn in the history of the Soviet Era before it fully winds down by the end of the decade.  

The horror is not even this patriarch, as if a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario is about to transpire, but ultimately a figure of the state, a police captain named Zhurov (Aleksey Poluyan), head of a squad in a small town who kidnaps Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova), the daughter of the secretary of Regional Committee and Artem's niece who, when she and a male friend breakdown at the same home, frames the home owner for killing Sunka, the Vietnamese employee who tries to take a stand, and does to Angelika over the film what made Cargo 200 as notorious as it became. And, before anyone asks, and with a huge trigger warning, the source novel from William Faulkner, legendary as an author for work like As I Lay Dying (1930), a figure of grand significance in Southern US literature, was as controversial. Penned in 1931, emphasising how literature could get away with far more than cinema at the time in the United States, it was an attempt at a more accessible work for Faulkner which was yet also a lurid pot boiler. With Zhurov being played by a prohibition gangster , in mind to sexual violation with a glass bottle that marks the moment Cargo 200 gets into the horror territory, the source material had this but with a cob of corn, the film for its deeply uncomfortable content still working from a source that was startling when published decades earlier and would decades later in this form.

Scored to rock and pop music, like many films from this period, Cargo 200 could have easily been a tasteless film, and good grief, Cargo 200 will get more extreme as it goes, as Zhurov, claiming Angelika as his girlfriend, has her handcuffed to a bed in the home he shares with his mother, fully complicit to his crime. This psychologically damaged side to him is contrasted by the fact that his police force is just as horrifying, cops who torture their suspects, even killing one at one point and covering it up as resisting arrest. This makes the nastiness of Brother to Dead Man's Hand more understandable in context, but here it fells more significant, in that this for as extreme as it is, is also as extreme a condemnation of what the Soviet Union was as you could get, positioning it as this repugnant period of Russian history even for Aleksey Balabanov's cinema.

Huge trigger warnings are required for the film, managing, even if sick, to try for humour, in that actress Agniya Kuznetsova, in one of her first ever roles, has a hard role to play.  She deserves credit to act this film where she spends most of it naked handcuffed to a bed, and that is before this becomes a ghoulish film too. That, where in an extreme macabre moment, when assigned to help ship the Cargo 200 with his officers, in coffins lined with zinc, Zhurov finds her boyfriend, a soldier killed in the Afghan war, and takes him to her as a bedfellow to keep her company, or lets others have sex with her before shooting them and not taking the corpse out the room. It is never objectifying to her, before one should ask with understandable concern, as this is all ugly, the brown and industrial locations adding to the bleakness without the sense of it being miserable and nasty for a cheap pop.

The exaggerated extreme managed to not just be disgusting, but provocation for a director who has played to the grotesque in Of Freaks and Men (1998), and it is contrasted by the grounded reality. A semblance of hope is to be found when Artem by the end comes to church and faith, less a contrivance, especially when you consider just how nihilistic Aleksey Balabanov's cinema is, but having felt he has went through something so horrifying with the events that transpire, particularly as Angelika is a niece, that it alters him and forces him into finding his faith from the darkness of the world, not the opposite way round as one would presume. It feels not shock for shock's sake, but a twisted farce that plays throughout the film. When the person to end this is an older woman out for revenge with a shotgun, it is in a room full of decaying bodies like a Tobe Hooper film, and that it is an act that has little interest in rescuing anyone, like a perverse Jacobean revenge story. For obvious reasons, Cargo 200 has to be proceeded with in caution, even for Aleksey Balabanov's career, in that this feels like the bleakest, nastiest film from the director even when later films like The Stoker (2010) deal with pointless killing and violence. It is a film which is compelling as a sudden stark shock, but with mind that even this ends with an atheist professor finding God from the horror, even Aleksey Balabanov in his lurid story here marks itself out with a greater spectrum of emotion in its stomach. That it is told as being a "true story", itself as brutal a condemnation of Soviet Russia as you can get, adds so much weight to what he had for this film.