Minority View: Cargo 200 by Aleksei Balabanov blog

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The horror film is a genre with conventions that are not always easy to identify. Horror films are not necessarily about the supernatural because there is a kind of science fiction -- Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) for instance -- that follows its conventions. Horror films do not always infuse the spectator with terror because David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) is a horror film that arouses different emotions. But what can perhaps be asserted is that horror films tend to deal with the notion of contamination in one form or another. The Exorcist and The Omen are about the contamination of the Christian world by 'dark' forces. If we define horror cinema thus, there is still a sub-category outside the definition exemplified by Psycho, John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). These films are not apparently about 'contamination', at least in the same sense, but it can be argued that they still involve the same notion although in a modified way. Aleksei Balabanov's ferocious Russian film Cargo 200 (Gruz 200), which is most usefully characterized as a horror film from the latter mould, may be understood more clearly through the category -- although the extremity of its achievement makes it necessary for us to examine how it takes it further.

The four films just cited tell the stories of one person or a group of (usually inoffensive) people who venture into terrain away from the civilized mainstream and are subjected to bizarre and horrific acts by people who are nominally civilized but who have allowed civilization to slip away, as it were, and the protagonists are initiated by these 'mutants' into a new reality which destroys them. What these films also have in common is that no explanation is provided for why these 'rejects' of civilization have mutated. One rational/ social science way of interpreting the kind of horror film to which Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre belong (films about a horrific 'initiation') in the light of the 'contamination' criterion provided is that civilization and organized society are never able to achieve their ends because of the dark human psyche and that they unwittingly create cesspools of disaffection in which breed social mutants of various sorts.

Cargo 200 is set in the former Soviet Union 1984 just after the death of Yuri Andropov and with the gargantuan Communist system slowly but surely grinding to a close. The war is still going on in Afghanistan and coffins (codenamed Cargo 200) are returning every day. The naive individual subjected to the horrific happenings is Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova), the daughter of a party official in the vicinity of Leninsk and a girl whose fiancé Kolya is a paratrooper in Afghanistan. Angelica is due to go on a picnic with her young friends at her father's dacha the next morning but she runs into Valera (Leonid Bichevin) at a discotheque and the two dance into the late hours of the night. After the conclusion of the dance the already drunk Valera wants to buy himself some more vodka and visits a bootlegger several miles away in the darkness and that is when the film's affinity to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre becomes visible.

It will not be right to chronicle the horrors that Angelika undergoes but the monsters that assail her are not of one kind but manifold, and all of them are apparently flourishing under the eyes of the Soviet system, which is a 'civilised mainstream' becoming narrower each day while the contaminated pools of disaffection get bigger. In fact the principal monster among them is actually a policeman named Zhurov (Alexey Poluyan). All this time, Angelika keeps threatening her assailants with severe consequences from her party-official father and her paratrooper fiancé Kolya, whose revenge might be fearful. The most shocking part of the film is perhaps her finding herself in bed with the dead Kolya who has just returned from Afghanistan in a lead-lined coffin.

Most of my descriptions of the film have dealt with the events in the narrative but the cinematography (Alexander Simonov) needs special mention. The narrative is punctuated by stunning shots of the giant industrial complex at Leninsk, often for seemingly no reason. On reflection, it is evident that the film would not have been as effective without these shots because they suggest a monstrously impersonal system, entirely Man made, designed scrupulously for Man's betterment and working incessantly for him but completely oblivious of men. Another aspect of the film is its reliance on diegetic music -- largely trashy Russian pop. This is a deliberate refusal to strive after emotional effects and it brings an austerity to the film that horror films rarely seek.

A characteristic of Cargo 200 that takes it away from the genre of the horror film and brings it much closer to Surrealism is its tone of dark irony rather than the extremity of its vision. Angelika is not 'innocent' as the protagonists of horror films usually are but she is the privileged representative of a system in collapse. She undergoes experiences not far away but in almost familiar terrain. It is only that the slumbering state and the party have become so alienated from the society of their own creation that social mutants thrive under their noses. Balabanov steadfastly refuses to take sides - between the innocent victims and the perpetrators - because the victims in this case are actually implicated the creation of the monsters. If, as has been said, all major works should be identified by the way they transform a genre, Alexey Balabanov's Cargo 200 is a major work that uses the conventions of the horror film to shed disturbing light on a profound political truth.

Balabanov is not the most celebrated filmmaker in Russia today but Cargo 200 provides evidence of an astonishingly original sensibility, one that in my view ranks with those of Bunuel and Fassbinder in the ferocity of its social criticism, here specifically of an outmoded political system.