CARGO 200

USSR, 1984. It all begins harmlessly enough: Artiom, a professor of “scientific atheism”, visits his brother Miša, a colonel in the army. They talk about the war in Afghanistan, and their anxieties about the disorientated state of contemporary youth. Artiom’s car breaks down on the road back to Leningrad, and he seeks help at a remote farmstead. The inhabitants of the rundown old place behave oddly, but they get his vehicle back on the road. Later that evening, Valera, the fi ancé of Miša’s daughter Liza, arrives at the same place in search of illegally distilled vodka. Liza’s friend Angelica is with him. A session of heavy drinking begins, and events subsequently take a dramatic turn culminating in a homicide, and the abduction of Angelica by Žurov, a police sergeant. He chains the helpless girl to a bed in his apartment, apathetically watched by his mother, whose brain has long been addled by drink. Angelica now undergoes martyrdom at the hands of this unscrupulous sadist, while Žurov, of all people, is placed in charge of investigating the murder and the abduction. But Artiom has started his own hunt…
Aleksei Balabanov’s eleventh film CARGO 200 (the title refers to the repatriation of soldiers who fell in Afghanistan) draws a bleak picture of the pre-perestroika Soviet Union. It shows a society shaped by cynicism and crumbling moral values, the borders between good and evil are blurred, and the fossilized state apparatus is a breeding ground for hideous crimes. As much a social portrait as a thriller the film depicts in shocking scenes a world that has plunged off the rails.