Our friend Maya turned us onto this film. Download it. It's that damn good. Trust me on this one.
From Tony Anemone at KinoKultura:
Although it may be too soon to declare Cargo 200 the best Russian film of 2007, it is hard to imagine much competition for the title of most controversial. Borrowing freely from various cinematic genres (for example, anti-war, family drama, psychological thriller) and literary classics (especially Dostoevskii's novels), Balabanov has constructed a rigorous and unsparing film about the death of the Soviet Union that is guaranteed to shock even the most jaded viewers. According to Balabanov, Soviet society circa 1984 was the poisonous wreck of an industrial civilization tottering on the verge of collapse from the sum of its political, social, and individual vices: a hopeless foreign war of choice bleeding the country dry, a terrorized and infantilized populace, rampant alcohol abuse among young and old, complete police lawlessness (bespredel), a geriatric and out of touch government, a dismal and hypocritical popular culture, an arrogant and cynical intelligentsia, a nihilistic younger generation, and the soul-crushing hopelessness of everyday life for the masses. When the best representatives of the younger generation were sacrificed to vain and doomed imperial ambitions in Afghanistan, the future was put in the hands of amoral black-marketers (fartsovshchiki), the absolutely predictable products of a soulless, cynical, and materialistic culture, who would become the business elite of post-Soviet Russia. In this way, Cargo 200 represents the continuation of the search for the origins of the post-Soviet power class that Balabanov began in Blind Man's Bluff.
Although Russian cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s reveled in the horrors of Soviet life (chernukha) , such films have become exceedingly rare in recent years. Indeed, not since Aleksei German's Khrustalev, My Car! (Khrustalev, mashinu!, 1998) have Russian movie-goers been treated to such graphic representations of social squalor, and sexual and psychological torture. The film's reception has been predictable: while many leading critics have hailed Cargo 200 as Balabanov's best and most important film, Russian theater owners have been reluctant to book it, and viewers have walked out of screenings in droves. It is, truth be told, a shocking and cruel film.
But Balabanov's film is much more than chernukha . A society in crisis and on the eve of a social revolution, a profound generation gap, intense conversations about the existence of God and the soul, the symbolic confrontation between the materialist beliefs of the atheistic intelligentsia and the utopian faith of the common people, a philosophical murder mystery that results in a religious conversion, family dramas symptomatic of larger social and psychological pathology—all these motifs connect Cargo 200 to the themes and obsessions of the classic Russian novel and particularly to Dostoevskii's metaphysical murder mysteries. Like Dostoevskii in Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, Balabanov seeks to transform a horrifying crime story into a symbolic portrait of an entire society and civilization, and, perhaps, to suggest a way out of the current impasse. While one could argue that Balabanov's borrowings are more like Dostoevshchina than Dostoevskii, they are a testament to the director's seriousness, ambition, and his desire to engage in the national discourse about post-Soviet national identity, in which Dostoevskii is, of course, a critical figure.
[...]Among the many remarkable aspects of Cargo 200 are the tight plot construction, intense thematic focus, brilliant soundtrack, and the way Balabanov invests apparently ordinary objects, places, characters, and conversations with larger social and symbolic significance. Everything seen on the screen or heard on the soundtrack contributes to the plot or the overall theme. The clogged spark plugs of the professor's underpowered Zaporozhets, the run-down and poorly furnished Soviet apartments, the dingy provincial youth Klub, the clothing, hair styles, music and television broadcasts, and the giant chemical factory that blights the urban landscape—all recognizable aspects of Soviet reality of the 1980s—combine to form a symbolic image of a decrepit, morally empty, and hypocritical culture and society. Place names like Kaliaevo and Leninsk point to a historical context for the horrors of late Soviet life. [4] Despite the significant role played by coincidence, nothing is random in the world of Cargo 200 : ordinary conversations foreshadow future plot developments, apparently unrelated actions provide an ironic commentary on characters' moral dilemmas, chance meetings determine characters' fates. [5] You can be assured that the gun cleaned in act one will be fired more than once before the end of act five!
[...]The result of all these textual, aural, and visual correspondences is a powerful sense of inevitability, even when the action on the screen is quite implausible. Absolutely everything in the film points to the crisis of Soviet values and civilization that came to a head in the mid-1980s: the breakdown of Artem's car, Zhurov's mother's blind and unquestioning love for her perverse and criminal son, the brutality of the organs of State power, the rape of the innocent and passive daughter of the party secretary, governmental incompetence, and an endless and pointless foreign war that is destroying the best of the younger generation. With a hypocritical and cowardly intelligentsia, a well-intentioned but ineffectual military, a brutal and corrupt police, a brutalized populace, and a cynically hedonistic younger generation, it is no wonder that Soviet civilization's days are numbered.
This is the film's strongest and, paradoxically, its weakest, point. Most who remember the Soviet Union in the 1980s will probably agree that Balabanov has captured some of the hopelessness, bleakness, and brutality of the period. The problem is that Balabanov overdoes it and the resulting picture of Soviet life is exaggerated and one-sided to the point of caricature. By focusing so relentlessly and exclusively on degeneration, squalor, and depravity, Balabanov may shock the audience but he simplifies history. [6] As a result, the film's warning against idealizing the Soviet past is weakened and the film as a whole feels forced and schematic. And this is too bad because, in a period of resurgent nationalism and imperial nostalgia, Russia needs images of the true complexity of the Soviet past more than ever.
DVD Technical Information:
Title: Груз 200/Cargo 200
Year: 2007
Country: Russia
Director: Aleksei Balabanov
Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso+mds
Size: 3.33 GB
Length: 1:25:45
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG 2 @ ~6500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97
Audio: Russian- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 256 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
DVD5 Megaupload Links
BluRay Rip Technical Information:
Title: Груз 200/Cargo 200
Year: 2007
Country: Russia
Director: Aleksei Balabanov
Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 4.37 GB
Length: 1:28:55
Programs used: mkvMerge
Resolution: 1280x720
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: AVC H264 @ ~6500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.97 fps
Audio: Russian- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 640 kb/s
Subtitles: English
BluRay Rip Megaupload Links
