Cargo 200

1984, the Soviet Union. While the war in Afghanistan goes on, a militia captain in a provincial town abducts a young woman and keeps her in his own flat. Her fiancé is at the front; what comes home is a zinc coffin. The title belongs to that coffin: Cargo 200 was the Soviet military code for transporting the bodies of the war dead. The film is not interested in crime. It is interested in how ordinary rot becomes: nobody comes to help, nobody is surprised, and the state and the violence wear the same uniform. Balabanov draws it as the last years of a system coming apart. The form is cold and distant. The camera does not amplify the horror, it records it. Pop songs of the period are laid over scenes in deliberate mismatch. The production history shows how disturbing the film is. Many actors who read the script refused to take part, among them Yevgeny Mironov, Sergey Makovetsky and Kirill Pirogov, and Makovetsky advised the director not to make it at all. Sergey Astakhov, Balabanov's longtime cinematographer, broke with him over it. Afterwards many cities refused to screen it. Who it is for: viewers who want hard Russian cinema and dark portraits of the Soviet collapse. Who it is not for: almost everyone. The film softens nothing about sexual violence or the sight of corpses.