Cargo 200 is a very crude fresco of a humanity on the ropes, attacked everywhere by the virus of decadence and conformism. In the context of a society that is violently retreating and of individuals who stand as the sovereign measure of all values, Balabanov delivers a ferocious punch in the stomach of the Western spectator. This is how the idols of a world, of an organized system, die. The Russia of the 80s is collapsing everywhere, and it is not just an aesthetic truth that can be seen from the rubble of dilapidated and rickety houses, but it is first of all a moral truth. The figures of the crisis present themselves in a comic dialogue from the beginning, two brothers, a colonel and a university professor: army and university, the places of discipline, out of date, obsolete. Moral and political corruption advances in front of them, the anxiety of revenge, nostalgia, revanchism are the feelings that nourish the complexity of a frontier horizon and structural changes. A corrupt police force that governs and controls the social field in its own way always seems on the verge of becoming confused with a criminal organization, laying down what remains of the vestiges of the Empire that no one believes in anymore. The dogmas of materialism and socialism collapse together. Gangs of penniless, misfit and uprooted young people dedicate themselves to the new fashions that came from the West: rock, electronics, and above all alcohol. A horizon in which a right arises based on the oppression of the weakest, as I happened to write about Carrere's Limonov who described precisely this crack in Russia's history. But where “the old world dies, and the new one is slow to appear in the chiaroscuro, monsters are generated”.
Zhurov, a shady and impotent law enforcement bureaucrat, kidnaps the beautiful Angelica, after raping her in a chilling manner, diverts the investigation for her recovery, having an old prison companion with whom she shared drinks arrested and then killed nocturnal. The result is transversal revenge, peppered with atrocious and extreme images. Social discomfort and psychic delirium reach an unsustainable peak when the police officer does not even hesitate to reopen the decomposing body of Angelica's boyfriend, who died in Afghanistan, to place it next to her body while he has her raped by a convict. The policeman is finally killed by the widow of the man he had killed, who however, almost with quiescent fatalism, does not untie Angelica's chains; the director is perhaps suggesting that no liberation is possible, or perhaps the three deaths surrounding the raped woman are to be understood symbolically as the orders (army, police and crime) that have violated the beauty and integrity of the motherland. The fact is that Balabanov's film is not for everyone. It is both visually and morally, difficult to sustain: a hell without redemption, where the idols of the past discover their feet of clay while fueling in their shadow disillusionment, disillusionment and perverse anxieties of individual affirmation. The old Russia and its values ​​are lost and defeated forever in Afghanistan (the 200 cargo planes are the planes that brought back the dead in the 1984 war), but what looms on the horizon is much more terrible and real than the ghosts of past ideologies .
https://bifurcazioni.blogspot.com/2021/10/cargo-200-aleksej-balabanov.html