Aleksej Balabanov
Cargo 200

In 1984 the Soviet Union was still alive...

The Red Army was still in Afghanistan...

Perestroika was taking shape and life (unfortunately short-lived)...

The Russian soldiers were returning home with Cargo 200...

Horizontally...

Aleksei Balabanov, a little-known and interesting Russian director, narrates the end of the Soviet Union drawing from a true event. In a forgotten region of the USSR, the daughter of the secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party, engaged to a serviceman on a mission, after an evening at the disco, is forced by a friend before being taken home, to follow him to a shack inhabited by an ex-convict, his wife, and a Vietnamese servant, where the first distills vodka illicitly. In the same place, due to a car breakdown, a professor of scientific atheism stops by, traveling to meet his mother who "Thank God" is doing well. These lives, randomly intertwined, will be crossed by a circle permeated by a psychological violence of rare brutality.

The girl will be kidnapped by a madman (the policeman in charge of the investigation) who will handcuff her to the headboard of a bed at the home of his mother, numbed by the television broadcasting performances by the Pesniary and speeches by Gorbachev, and immersed in filth and neglect. It is on that bed that she will witness murders and acts of extreme cruelty, enough to make one reflect on man's potential to become the worst invention of creation.

With skillful use of cold colors, spare settings and worn-out scenography, with the possible and unsurprising use of old film to make the atmosphere heavily "gray," Balabanov signs a ruthless thriller, icy, metaphorical, an attack on the lethal fading of the regime, so much so as to make him affirm: "We were waiting for the collapse of communism. Communism has fallen but the collapse remains."

Some sequences are atrocious, capable of twisting even the most solid psyche, the broadest morality. Such as the one where the military man, returned dead to his homeland, is decorated in the broken-open coffin, gathered by weight, and thrown, with vocal announcement, onto the bed next to the handcuffed girl. Or the one where she is abandoned in the room in pitiful conditions, surrounded by three corpses, one fresh and two in the early stages of decomposition.

A terrible film, where the "dead" lives, protagonists of this dark story, will not have an expectable conclusion. The film ends with the hypotheses of enrichment of two schemers exploiting the fall of the regime. Hypotheses that in post-communist Russia will be absolutely prophetic, with the birth of oligarchies and the savage privatization of state assets.

But, apart from everything. Was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, after the Glasnost and Perestroika of a Nobel Peace Prize winner, good or bad?