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(More customer reviews)Every once in awhile a really off-beat film comes along that shocks you out of your moviegoing complacency. It has disturbing images or a bizarre storyline or is just downright strange and different. The original "Night of the Living Dead" (tame now but in 1968 ...), "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet," "El Topo," "Wild Bunch," "Mad Max," "Repulsion," "From Dusk to Dawn" come immediately to mind. "Cargo 200" is one of those films, a real surprise and shocker from Russian director Alexey Balabanov. The film, a gritty thriller loosely based on actual events (Russian serial killer Gennady Mikhasevich) that becomes the blackest of black comedies, is set in 1984 in provincial Russia, where the gloom of Soviet life has reached extreme depths. It runs the gamut of wayward youth, Soviet-era rock 'n' roll, philosophical discussions on religion and state atheism, government corruption, murder, sexual perversions, police brutality and death. This is a film that shatters all expectations and preconceptions. As it progresses, it just keeps getting more and more bizarre.
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Cargo 200 (2008)Even before being released Alexey Balabanov s new film Cargo 200 attracted much attention in the press. The critics unanimously acknowledge Cargo 200 as one of the most significant films of the year, and many consider it to be Russian director Alexey Balabanov s (Brother, Of Freaks And Men) best film yet.The title of Balabanov's twelfth film is a military term for the coffins transporting dead soldiers back home during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The effects of that decade-long conflict provide a unifying theme for this highly controversial film that recalls the work of Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke but with a distinctly Russian point-of-view.Cargo 200 begins in 1984 with the introduction of two brothers: a Soviet Army colonel, and the head of the Faculty of Scientific Communism at Leningrad University. The university professor travels to visit his mother in a remote town. When his car brakes down, he stops at a rural farmhouse occupied by a husband, wife and their Vietnamese farm hand. The professor engages in a philosophical argument about the existence of God with the family patriarch, whose heated criticisms of official atheism are fueled by Utopian dreams and vodka distilled in the family barn.Meanwhile, a young man and the daughter of a Soviet secretary of a regional party committee meet at a party. The couple decides to take a drive, and their destination is the rural farmhouse. Lurking in the shadows of the farmhouse is Zhurov, a character vaguely based on Russian serial killer Gennady Mikhasevich. Although Mikhasevich was simply a depraved lunatic, Balabanov presents Zhurov as an emblem of both human perversion and the manifest corruption of the Soviet government. Zhurov s appearance signals a series of loathsome events that form the rest of the film's narrative.In a Wall Street Journal interview, Alexey Balabanov spoke of Cargo 200 in the following terms: "I show what filth we lived in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards." In light of Balabanov's remarks, Cargo 200 might best be summarized as a grim epitaph for the death of the former Soviet Union.
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